🚀 go-pugleaf

sanctioned by the proclamations? I assert that it cannot.... A
    custom is 'such a usage as by common consent and uniform practice
    has become a law.' In 1841 there could have been no custom of
    slavery in Hong Kong as now set up, for, save a few fishermen and
    cottagers, the island was uninhabited; and between 1841 and 1844,
    the date of the Ordinance expressly prohibiting slavery, there was
    no time for such a custom to have grown up; and slavery in
    every form having been by express law prohibited by the Royal
    proclamation of the Queen in 1845, no custom contrary to that law
    could, after that date, grow up, because the thing was by express
    law illegal. I go further, and I find that the penal law of China,
    whilst it facilitates the adoption of children into a family to
    keep up its succession, prohibits by section 78 the receiving into
    his house by any one of a person of a different surname, declaring
    him guilty of 'confounding family distinctions,' and punishing him
    with 60 blows; the father of the son who shall 'give away' ... his
    son is to be subject to the same punishment. Again, section 79
    enacts that whosoever shall receive and detain the strayed or lost
    child of a respectable person, and, instead of taking it before
    the magistrate, sell such child as a slave, shall be punished by
    100 blows and three years' banishment. Whosoever shall sell such
    child for marriage or adoption into any family as son or grandson
    shall be punished with 90 blows and banishment for two years and
    a half. Whosoever shall dispose of a strayed or lost slave shall
    suffer the punishment provided by the law reduced one degree