public opinion and public action here; which arguments, doubts and
difficulties are the less easy to combat because they have been rather
hinted at than avowed."

The Chief Justice then sentenced several prisoners for enticing,
kidnaping or detaining children with intent to sell them into slavery,
to penal servitude for terms ranging from 18 months to 2 years.

On October 20th, Sir John Smale wrote the Governor:

"I cannot understand why such classes should as classes increase
in this Colony at all, unless it be that (in addition to the
Chinese demand for domestic servants and brothels) there be an
increased foreign element increasing the demand. I fear that a
high premium is obtained by persons who kidnap girls in the high
prices which they realize on sale to foreigners as kept women.[A]
No one can walk through some of the bye-streets in this Colony
without seeing well dressed China girls in great numbers whose
occupations are self-proclaimed; or pass those streets, or go into
the schools in this Colony, without counting beautiful children
by the hundred whose Eurasian origin is self-declared. If the
Government would inquire into the present condition of these
classes, and still more, into what has become of these women and
their children of the past, I believe that it will be found that
in the great majority of cases the women have sunk into misery,
and that of the children the girls that have survived have been
sold to the profession of their mothers, and that, if boys, they
have been lost sight of or have sunk into the condition of the
mean whites of the late slave-holding states of America. The more
I penetrate below the polished surface of our civilization the