punishment, and the money shall be restored to the party from whom it had been received." The Chief Justice continues: "After reading these extracts from the Penal Code of China--an old Code revised from time to time ... I cannot see how it can be maintained that any form of slavery was ever tolerated by law in Hong Kong, as it _de facto_ exists here, or how the words of the two proclamations of 1841 could be said to bear the color of tolerating slavery under the British flag in Hong Kong. It is clear to me that the Queen's proclamation of 1845, which I have already quoted at full, declares slavery absolutely illegal here." The truth, then, seems to be that a great demand had arisen for Chinese women at Hong Kong, the most direct cause being the irregular conduct of foreigners--officials, private individuals, soldiers and sailors--who gathered there at the time of the opium wars, and settled there in large numbers when Hong Kong became a British possession. This demand was responded to from the native side, for it was said: "When the colony of Hong Kong was first established in 1842, it was forthwith invaded by brothel keepers and prostitutes from the adjoining districts of the mainland of China, who brought with them the national Chinese system of prostitution, and have ever since labored to carry it into effect in all its details."[A] The demand that brought this supply was further added to from two sources, first, Chinese residents attracted to Hong Kong had made money there rapidly, and had fallen into profligate and luxurious manners of life, and second, Chinese going abroad to Australia, Singapore and San Francisco, created a demand for immoral women in these foreign lands which called for supplies from Hong Kong, and at Singapore the demand came also from the class of foreigners who resided there. [Footnote A: Hong Kong was occupied by the British in 1841, but not ceded until 1842.] The system of management of prostitution was originally Chinese, and differs much from anything known under Western civilization, in that the women are never what we speak of as "fallen women," because not the victims of seduction nor of base propensities that have led to the choice of such a life. They are either slaves trained for or sold into shame, or women temporarily held for debt by a sort of mortgage. To this Chinese system of prostitution, however, there was soon applied at Hong Kong a Government system of regulation 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.