Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: Food or junk food?

willing to submit to the law, they may remain, but
    on condition of obeying the law, whether it accords with their
    notions of right or wrong or not; and if remaining they act
    contrary to the law, they must take the consequences."
Sir John Smale's utterance created intense feeling among these Chinese
merchants, who at once called upon the Governor to represent their
views and to protest. The Governor informed them that "slavery in any
form could not be allowed in the Colony." They protested that their
system of adoption and of obtaining girls for domestic purposes was
not slavery; "and they referred to the more immoral practice of buying
girls for the Hong Kong brothels, which, they alleged, Government
departments had connived at, though it was a practice most hateful to
the respectable Chinese." The Governor then asked them for their views
in writing, and they sent them to him in the form of a memorial,
containing the following words:
    "Your petitioners are informed that his Lordship, the Chief
    Justice, after the trial of a case of purchasing free persons for
    prostitution, said, in the course of his judgment, that buying
    and selling of girls for domestic servitude was an indictable
    offense;--which put all native residents of Hong Kong in a state
    of extreme terror; all great merchants and wealthy residents in
    the first instance being afraid lest they might incur the risk of
    being found guilty of a statutory offence, whilst the poor and low
    class people, in the second instance, feared being deprived of a
    means to preserve their lives (by selling children to be domestic
    servants)."
These petitioners claimed:
    That the buying of boys for "adoption" and of girls for domestic
    servitude, "widely differs

in the place, and 100 more were expected to
arrive within a few days. Besides these, there are also Chinese slaves
in almost every Chinese settlement throughout the United States. In
California, they are to be found largely at San Francisco, Oakland,
Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, San Jose, Watsonville,
Monterey and Los Angeles. Willing or unwilling, the Chinese prostitute
is none the less a slave, bought and sold at pleasure from one to
another, earning wealth for others and never for herself. Recently,
three girls who were taken from a den in San Francisco, declared that
they had been sold for three thousand dollars apiece to the keeper,
and that they were flogged when their earnings for the keeper fell
below three hundred dollars each a month. If the prostitute were not
willing to be a slave, that would not procure her liberty,--it would
only procure her more abuse than the willing slave. On the ship
coming over, the slaves are well drilled in their task on arrival, of
swearing themselves into slavery, and well threatened if they dare
to disobey. Then they are packed with stories as to the terrible
character of Americans, particularly the rescue workers. One Chinese
girl concluded she would take all the abuse of the rescue home rather
than forego a chance for liberty, though she knew of no reason to
disbelieve the fearful warnings she had received. On the first night
of her arrival she did not undress nor go to bed when the other girls
retired. Someone found her standing about, and asked her why she
was not off for bed. She replied pathetically: "I am waiting for my
beating." She had been informed that