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ve point seems to have been that an enforcement of the anti-slavery laws would have interfered in many instances with the illicit relations of the foreigner, exposing him to ignominy and sending the mother of his children to prison. It was sufficient for the "protected" woman to say, when the officer of the law rapped at her door, "This is not a brothel, but the private family residence of Mr. So-and-So," naming some foreigner,--perhaps a high-placed official,--and the officer's search would proceed no further. It was claimed that this slavery, and also domestic slavery, which sprang up so suddenly after the settlement of Hong Kong by the British, was the outgrowth of Chinese customs, and could not be suppressed but with the greatest difficulty, and their suppression was an unwarrantable interference with Chinese customs, Sir Charles Elliott having given promise from the first that such customs should not be interfered with. But, as we have shown, that promise was only made, "pending Her Majesty's pleasure," which had been very plainly and pointedly expressed later as opposed to slavery. As to the matter of "custom," Sir John Smale, Chief Justice of Hong Kong, said, in 1879, in the Supreme Court, on the occasion of sentencing prisoners for slave trading and kidnaping: "Can Chinese slavery, as it _de facto_ exists in Hong Kong, be considered a Chinese custom which can be brought within the intent and meaning of either of the proclamations of 1841 so as to be 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
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