"It may be mentioned here," says the report of the Commission, from which we cull these cases, "that from this date (July 6th, 1868) the practice has apparently prevailed of apprehending all the women found in unlicensed brothels" (in more correct language, those houses penetrated into by informers and reported to the Registrar as brothels). These accusations were not always true, by any means. Seven women were apprehended at one time during this year, on the charge of a watchman, that they kept and were inmates of an unlicensed brothel, "the chief witness being a child 10 years old ... five of the women were married, and two, children of 13 and 14 years old, are described as unmarried." They were all, even the children, convicted, and sent to the Lock Hospital for the indecent examination, in order to determine if they were in proper health to practice vice. Afterwards the Registrar concluded that the case had been got up by the watchman to extort money from the women. But the establishment of their innocence did not put them right again. Think of the horrible ordeal and the dirty court details through which these young girls had been put, on the testimony of a child of ten, and of a watchman determined that they should learn to give him money when he demanded it, or he would drive them into prostitution. One wonders how many hundreds of respectable families were thus bled of their small incomes by the vile informers who were being rewarded by Government for their extortion. Imagine the terror that respectable Chinese women suffered, knowing that any man might denounce them, out of malice, and thereby reduce them to the very worst conceivable form of slavery! Within a few years, nearly all the respectable Chinese women had disappeared from Hong Kong. Chief Inspector Whitehead testified before the Commission: "When an unlicensed brothel [i.e., a native house accused of being such] is broken up, the women have to resort to prostitution in most cases for a living." During 1869, one poor woman signed a bond to deport herself for five years rather than be taken to the Lock Hospital. But the "protected women," with their nursery of children they were raising for brothel slavery, being the mistresses of foreigners, were not persecuted in this manner, so, by a kind of mad infatuation the Government seemed bent on encouraging and developing immoral women and driving decent women either into prostitution, or, by the reign of terror, out of the Colony. In 1869, five women were charged before the Registrar General, and three of them were discharged as innocent. Then the Registrar General decided _to make the punishment of the first of the remaining two depend upon the state of health of the second_. This second was examined and found diseased, and in consequence of that fact, the first one was fined fifty dollars or two months' imprisonment! The Commission speaks of this as a "somewhat curious" case. We wonder how the punished woman described it.