tified that she had seen several women sent away to California. She
had been present when bargains were made, the price varying. In Hong
Kong the price was from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars; they
would bring in California from two hundred and fifty to three hundred
and fifty dollars.

Owing to the restriction of Chinese immigration, and the penal laws
against importing women for evil uses, the value of a slave girl on the
Pacific Coast has greatly increased; it is now $3,000.

The system of Chinese brothel slavery differs from the white slave
trade, in that the Chinese brothel slaves are not weak or wicked women
who have fallen into the clutches of traffickers, as so many of our
European and American white slaves unquestionably are, but are good
girls who have been sold by their actual owners into a life of shame
for money, sometimes sold by their own parents. Some are not sold
outright, but are mortgaged to pay off a loan. So much is credited each
month until the debt is canceled--unless fresh debts, real or
fictitious, keep the victim indefinitely, as with the white slaves. On
the marked differences between the white slave and the yellow slave, the
commissioners previously quoted say: "Prostitutes in Europe are, as a
general rule, fallen women, the victims of seduction, or possibly of
innate vice. Being the outcasts of society, and having little, if any,
prospect of being admitted again into decent and respectable circles of
life, deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards of
their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of conscience,
they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek oblivion in
excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese prostitutes of Hong Kong
are an entirely different set of people. Very few of them can be called
fallen women, scarcely any of them are the victims of seduction in the
English sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of
them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women in
Canton or Macao, have been brought up for that life and trained in
various accomplishments suited to it. They frequently know neither
father nor mother, except what they call a pocket-mother, that is, the
woman who bought them from others." There are 18,000 such slaves in
Hong Kong, if the estimates accepted by the commissioners are correct.

In China the yellow slave has hope of escape from her bondage. If she is
pretty and accomp