Ought we not to give active support to our government in its fulfillment of its treaty agreement with the nations of Europe? And should not our example in the Orient and our conduct in our own country be more worthy of our national moral standards? If so, then such an association as this has a more than local service to render. Placed in this important center, it must reach out both to the East and to the West, awaken interest, give warning, and help to provide a chain of national protective agencies to combat and destroy the closely linked chain of purveyors of vice. CHAPTER XVI. THE YELLOW SLAVE TRADE. During the administration of President Hayes the United States consul general at Shanghai, Mr. D. H. Bailey, made a report to the president, relating to slavery in China and the menace to our country from that cause. He enclosed with his report a translation of the laws governing slaves, some of which are as follows: "If a female slave deserts her master's house she shall be punished with eighty blows. Whoever harbors a fugitive wife or slave, knowing them to be fugitives, shall participate equally in their punishment. "A slave guilty of addressing abusive language to his master shall suffer death by being strangled. "The master or the relatives of a master of a guilty slave may chastise such slave in any degree short of death, without being liable to any punishment. "All slaves who are guilty of designedly striking their masters shall, without making any distinction between principals and accessories, be beheaded. "If accidentally they kill their master, they shall suffer death by being strangled." In China, and wherever Chinese live, slave girls and women are subject to two forms of slavery, domestic slavery and brothel slavery. Every respectable Chinese family has one or two house slaves. The brothel slave is a literal slave, bought and sold like a sheep or cow. Traffic in Chinese girls for wicked uses extended to Hong Kong as soon as the island became prosperous and populous after being ceded to Great Britain in 1841. From Hong Kong the horrid trade reached to California, and to Singapore and other places. Commissioners appointed by the governor of Hong Kong made a report in 1880, from which the following accounts are taken: "Young girls, virgins of thirteen or fourteen years of age, are brought from Canton or elsewhere and deflowered according to bargain, and as a regular business for large sums of money, which go to their owners. The regular earnings of the girls go to the same quarters, and the unfortunate creatures obviously form subjects of speculation to regular traders in this kind of business, who reside beyond our jurisdiction. Mr. Lister speaks of the brothel-keepers as a horrible race of cruel women, cruel to the last degree, who use an ingenious form of torture, which they call prevention of sleep, which he describes in detail."