Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers | Page 8

or license under surveillance. This modified the system, intensified the slavery, and was the cause of reducing many women from the respectable ranks of Chinese life at once and arbitrarily to the lowest depths of degradation, as we shall explain and demonstrate in subsequent chapters.
The native woman, rented for a monthly stipend from her owners was called "protected" at Hong Kong. What charm this word "protection," and the title "Protector" has held for certain persons, as applied to the male sex! "Man, the natural protector of woman." Forsooth, to protect her from what? Rattlesnakes, buffalo, lions, wildcats no more overrun the country, and why is this relation of "protector" still claimed? Why, to protect woman from rudeness, and insult and sometimes even worse. But from whence comes that danger of rudeness and insult or worse from which man is to protect woman? From man, of course. Man is, then, woman's natural protector to protect her from man, her natural protector. He is to set himself the task of defending her from his injury of her, and he is charmed with the avocation. He will protect her as Abraham protected Sarah when he took her into Egypt. "Do so-and-so," said Abraham to Sarah, "that it may be well with me,--for thy sake." The history of the Chinese slave woman as she came in contact with the foreigner at Hong Kong and at Singapore proceeds all along a pathway labelled "protection," down to the last ditch of human degradation. "Well with me," was the motive in the mind of the "protector." "For thy sake," the argument for the thing as put before the woman and before the world.

CHAPTER 2.
TREACHEROUS LEGISLATION.
In 1849 a man whose name is known the world over as a writer of Christian hymns, went to Canton as British Consul and Superintendent of trade. After a few years he returned to England, and in 1854 was knighted and sent out to govern the new colony of Hong Kong. It is he who wrote that beautiful hymn, among others, "Watchman, tell us of the night." He also wrote, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory." One is tempted to ask, in which Cross?--the kind made of gilded tin which holds itself aloft in pride on the top of the church steeple, or the Cross proclaimed in the challenge of the great Cross-bearer, "Whosoever doth not bear his Cross, and come after Me, cannot be my disciple"? The Cross is the emblem of self-sacrifice for the salvation of the world. Oh, that men really gloried in such self-sacrifice, and held it forth as the worthiest principle of life! Did Sir John Bowring hold aloft such a Cross as this, and, with his Master, recommend it to the world as the means of its elevation and emancipation from the blight of sin? We shall not judge him individually. His example should be a warning to the fact that even the most religious men can too often hold very different views of life according to whether they are embodied in religious sentiments or in one's politics. But nowhere are right moral conceptions more needed (not in hymn-book nor in church), as in the enactments by which one's fellow-beings are governed. Other religious men not so conspicuous as Sir John Bowring, but of more enlightened days than his, have died and left on earth a testimony to strangely divergent views and principles, according to whether they were crystallized in religious sentiments, or in the laws of the land, and according to whether they legislated for men or for women.
On May 2nd, 1856, Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies at London submitting a draft of an Ordinance which was desired at Hong Kong because of certain conditions prevailing at Hong Kong which were described in the enclosures in his despatch. Mr. Labouchere, the Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time, replied to the Governor's representations in the following language: "The Colonial Government has not, I think, attached sufficient weight to the very grave fact that in a British Colony large numbers of women should be held in practical slavery for the purposes of prostitution, and allowed in some cases to perish miserably of disease in the prosecution of their employment, and for the gain of those to whom they suppose themselves to belong. A class of persons who by no choice of their own are subjected to such treatment have an urgent claim on the active protection of Government."
Hong Kong, the British colony, had existed but fourteen years when this was written. Only a handful of fishermen and cottagers were on the island before the British occupation. Its Chinese population had come from a country where, as we have seen, laws against the buying