A committee appointed by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1877-1882) found that hundreds of the Mui Tsai, when they had outgrown their household enslavement, were being resold as prostitutes for shipment to Singapore, California and Australia. A species of Caucasian scum who lived in the colony were active partners in the trade. Governor Hennessy and Chief Justice John Smale forwarded the committee’s reports to the British House of Lords with urgent recommendations for tight corrective laws. The Lords, suddenly revealing an unsuspected concern for the integrity of Chinese customs, killed most of the proposed reforms. Establishment of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, helped to limit the kidnaping of women and girls, but the institution of Mui Tsai was to persist well into the twentieth century. The English eventually outlawed licensed brothels after decades of criticism from many countries. Covert prostitution continues at a brisk pace in Hong Kong today, with sailors favoring the Wanchai district and the bars of the Tsim Sha Tsui section of Kowloon. The Chinese are more inclined to patronize the western areas of Hong Kong Island. The dance hall and cabaret girls of Wanchai, whose ranks include some spectacularly beautiful women, charge their eager patrons about four dollars an hour for the privilege of dancing with them, sharing a plate of melon seeds and drinking tea. The cabarets are murky dens, furnished in Chinese warehouse modern, with a third-rate jazz band dragging the tempo along in the semidarkness. There is no guarantee of intimacies—emphatically not on the premises—and the prospective suitor is obliged to continue shelling out his money for repeated visits until the girl decides whether he has the kind of bankroll she could care for. If he is too repulsive to her, not even that will do. A cabaret girl can earn $300 a month or more, or about five times as much as a schoolteacher earns. Few of these girls speak English, but this ability has never been regarded as a prerequisite. Apart from the moral considerations of the job, its competitive aspects are becoming more intense all the time. Bar girls, who have little respect for the traditional preliminaries, may bestow their favors on five customers while the cabaret charmers are fencing with one.