🚀 go-pugleaf

to belong" to masters would be
    at once told that they were free agents and belonged to no one.

    3rd, The master who dared claim the ownership of a former slave
    would be prosecuted and suitably punished.

    4th, Any slave perishing miserably from disease would not only be
    healed at public expense, but placed where there was no further
    risk of contagion.

    5th, Since such slaves had "an urgent claim on the _active_
    protection of the Government," they would be treated as wards of
    the State until safe from like treatment a second time.

    6th, Since this slavery had sprung up in defiance of law, any
    official who at a future time connived at such crime would be
    liable to impeachment.

The Ordinance sent home for sanction, and approved of by Mr.
Labouchere as needed for the "protection" of slave women, was
proclaimed as Ordinance 12, 1857, after some slight modifications, and
an official appointed a few months before, called the "Protector of
Chinese," was charged with the task of its enforcement. This official
is also called the Registrar General at Hong Kong, but the former name
was given him at the first, and the official at Singapore charged
with the same duties is always, to this day, called the "Protector of
Chinese."

The new Ordinance embodied the following features:

    1st, The registration of immoral houses.

    2nd, Their confinement to certain localities.

    3rd, The payment of registration fees to the Government.

    4th, A periodical, compulsory, indecent examination of every woman
    slave.

    5th, The imprisonment of the slave in the Lock Hospital until
    cured, and then a return to her master and the exact conditions
    under which she was "from no choice of her own," exposed to
    contagion, with the expectation that she would be shortly returned
    again infected.

    6th, The