Even families of limited means purchased Mui Tsai, so that the mother of the family could take a job outside her home while the juvenile slavey cared for the children and contended with the simpler household drudgery. For the poorest families, sale of a daughter as a Mui Tsai was the natural solution to an economic crisis. But the institution, unacceptable to Western eyes from any aspect, had become the vehicle for gross abuses—the kidnaping and sale of women as prostitutes in Hong Kong or for transportation overseas. Kidnapings had become so numerous and flagrant by 1880 that Governor Hennessy and Sir John Smale, the colony’s Chief Justice, condemned the Mui Tsai system as contrary to British law. The Chinese protested that Mui Tsai was not slavery; it was an ancient, respectable adjunct of family life. Indeed, it was quite humane, for it saved the daughters of many impoverished families from being drowned. The English didn’t want that, did they? The Chinese offered no defense of kidnaping and forced prostitution arising from the institution of Mui Tsai. Under pressure of the colony government, influential Chinese set up the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, to rescue women and girls from flesh peddlers, provide a home for them in a section of the Chinese-operated Tung Wah Hospital, and train them for respectable occupations. Hennessy, like Governor Bowring, entangled himself in a series of acrimonious disputes with other colony officials, antagonizing them in groups by lashing out at the school system, prison maladministration and the harsh treatment of convicts. His most combative foe was another Irishman, General Donovan, head of the colony’s armed forces. Their verbal Donnybrook erupted over the perennially thorny question of how much Kowloon land the military was entitled to. General Donovan hit back at Hennessy with a sneak attack; he complained to the home government about the outrageous sanitary conditions in the colony—the lack of proper drainage, the polluted seafront, and the verminous tenements where entire Chinese families shared one room with their pigs and other domestic animals. All these conditions had existed in Hong Kong since 1841, but no one had called them to the home government’s attention with the holy indignation of Donovan. Osbert Chadwick was sent from England to investigate and he found sanitary conditions every bit as bad as Donovan had described them. Chadwick’s report became the basis, after long postponement and inaction, for the creation of a Sanitary Board and fundamental sanitary reforms.