🚀 go-pugleaf

Registrar
General of Hong Kong, previous to being knighted and sent to Singapore
as Governor of the Straits Settlements, replied to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies, in reference to the freedom of prostitutes,
"out of an experience of over a quarter of a century":

    "There are no restrictive regulations on the part of the
    Government which go to prevent or interfere with the entire
    freedom of the inmates of brothels, and they can go abroad alone.
    This statement will not, I hope, deceive you into believing that
    as a consequence they are really free agents ... such is actually
    not the case. A child who strikes its parent is liable to a death
    sentence. The girls in brothels are in the position of daughters
    to the keepers, and ... call them mother. There is no sense of
    freedom, as we understand the term, possible in such a state of
    affairs. The women are fearful of the unknown; of what should
    happen to them if they should disobey their pocket-mothers, and
    are terribly ignorant of everything connected with the Government
    under which they nominally live. It is out of the question to
    educate them up to the English standard of liberty of the subject.
    They stay but a few short years in an English Colony, seeing
    nothing but the worst phases of a life of vice and immorality, and
    only know of the officers of Government as 'foreign devils' or
    'barbarians'."

This is all only too true as regards California also, excepting that
the experiment of educating them by just treatment in the "English
standard of the liberty of the subject," has certainly never been
tried either in Singapore or America. The brothel keepers, however,
have learned to understand that matter of "liberty of the subject"
only too wel