Page:Europe in China.djvu/566

548 was springing up in Hongkong and living in abject misery, and he claimed that it was the duty of the Government to put down a system which, by debasing all moral tone, tended to crime. To rebut the arguments of Sir John Smale, Dr. Eitel wrote (October 25, 1879) an exhaustive report on the origin and characteristics of Chinese slavery and domestic servitude in Hongkong. The whole dispute was thereupon referred to the Secretary of State, and reviewed in a debate in the House of Lords (June 21, 1880), when Lord Stanley of Alderley, favourably criticizing Dr. Eitel's report, stated that the Attorney General had been wrong in his exposition of the law, but that, on the other hand, the Chief Justice had rushed into wild exaggerations. Lord Kimberley remarked, on the same occasion, that the custom of adoption was deeply interwoven with the forms of Chinese society, and that care must be taken not to confound the habits and institutions of the Chinese with what prevailed in other parts of the world. After this, the brief turmoil caused by the local slavery question disappeared as quickly as it had arisen. The Poleung Kuk, however, did good work in bringing kidnappers to justice, and on 24th March, 1881, the Chief Justice, having observed a steady decrease in kidnapping crimes, complacently ascribed it to his own efforts. He stated from the Bench that Chinese public opinion now appeared to have been educated to a great sense of the evils of kidnapping and the worst of the evils arising out of domestic servitude, that his denunciations of these crimes had produced an awakening of the Chinese conscience, and that a large proportion of the Chinese community now desired to improve the tone of social thought in China. 'Slavery of every kind,' he said, 'is doomed in China; it is merely a question of education through discussion and time.'

The question of Colonial defence was agitated for several years during this administration. All through summer 1878, rumours of war with Russia were current. Whilst this war fever lasted, the Volunteer Ordinance (2 of 1862) was re-published (May 4, 1878) and a new Volunteer Corps was formed and placed (May 16, 1878) under the command of Captain Dempster,