They speak of infanticide as an evil that "must be classed with evils almost unavoidable. Now if the buying of adoptive children and of servant girls is to be uniformly abolished, it is to be feared that henceforth the practice of infanticide will extremely increase beyond what it ever was. The heinousness of the violation of the great Creator's benevolence, which constitutes infanticide, is beyond comparison with the indulgence granted to the system of buying and selling children to prolong their existence." As though these benevolent persons only bought slaves for this one laudable purpose, to preserve their lives! "As regards the buyers, they look upon themselves as affording relief to distressed people, and consider the matter as an act akin to charity," etc. A flood of light is let in upon the matter of the reluctance of British officials to move in the putting down of domestic slavery and the buying and selling of boys among the natives, in the following well-deserved thrust at the weak point in the armor of the British officials: "The office of the Registrar-General was charged with the superintendence of prostitutes and the licensing of brothels and similar affairs. But _from 80 to 90 per cent of all these prostitutes in Hong Kong were brought into these brothels by purchase, as is well known to everybody_. If buying and selling is a matter of a criminal character, the proper thing would be, first of all, to abolish this evil (brothel slavery). But how comes it that since the first establishment of the Colony down to the present day the same old practice prevails in these licensed brothels, and has never been forbidden or abolished?" This was a center shot, and calculated to weaken the hands of at least the guilty officials. What could they say? Were the officials 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