Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: 1 Motore di ricerca Sportivo

of one will do for
    all. First, as we entered, was a couch for opium smoking; just
    beyond this a reception room, very gaudy, with dozens of hanging
    lamps, and at one end a shrine for the gods, and offerings before
    it. In a room back of the reception room, and also upstairs,
    there were girls in large numbers. A hard-featured old woman came
    forward from the back room, who, our interpreter said, was as good
    a specimen as we could possibly have seen of an old brothel-keeper
    of Canton, one who had been in the business for many years of
    buying or otherwise obtaining babies and girls, and training them
    for prostitution. The girls came crowding to the door of the back
    room, and looked in upon us with eager curiosity. Our interpreter
    called our attention to the manner of dressing the hair,--like
    married women,--as indicating their bad life. The interpreter said
    they were inducted usually at about thirteen years of age. They
    were all dressed very showily, and heavily powdered and painted,
    excepting some mere babies who were plainly dressed. Troops of
    little girls, from four to five years of age, swarmed out of the
    neighboring 'flower-boats' and gathered around us, screaming and
    scrambling, falling, laughing, and following us the full length of
    the street, which was made up of about twenty such boats on either
    side. And none of these innocent little things at all realized the
    fate in store for them. In one place we saw two very old women in
    the front room. In 

prepared, since the report of the Commission a few months before had
made public the scandals connected with the licensing and inspection
of brothels, to set about reforming the abuses by radical measures?
Certainly the Chief Justice was. He did everything in his power to
abolish slavery _as slavery_, not simply to abolish slavery when
unconnected with brothels. But subsequent history seems to indicate
that, from this point on, the British officials were ready to
compromise with the Chinese merchants, and the testimony from this
time forward was well-nigh universal in Hong Kong circles that
domestic slavery, or "domestic servitude," as Dr. Eitel recommended
that it should be called instead (since a weed by another name
may help the imagination to think it a rose), was very "mild" and
"harmless," and that the adoption of purchased boys was a "religious"
duty, or at least, had a religious flavor about it, as practiced by
the Chinese. But as we have already said, that adoption in order to be
lawful in China must be the adoption of one of the same surname.
On October 27th, 1879, the Chief Justice, at an adjourned sitting
of the Court for the purpose, sentenced two more offenders, one for
kidnaping a boy, and the other for detaining a girl with intent to
sell her. In the first case the Judge said:
    "Received as you had been into the father's house in charity, you
    availed yourself of the opportunity to steal his child, and tried
    to sell the child openly, probably having hawked him from door to
    door. The sentence of the Court on you, Tang Atim, is that you be
    imprisoned and kept to hard labor for two y