We sketched, a few weeks ago, the history of the progress, and the efforts still being made, towards extingnishing slavery. Another blow has since been dealt to the slave trade by our action at Zanzibar, and public opinion in England will' probably lead to some steps being soon taken to stop the traffic still carried on from the Portuguese settlement of Mozambique. We may hope that the recent legislation to prevent kidnapping in the Polynesian archipelago will be equally effective and there will then remain only the coolie traffic from Macao.
But slavery does not end with the open theft and sale which have wrought so much misery in Africa and Polynesia. This is the grosser and more brutal form; relies of the practico—kidnapping and abduct tion—in a milder form, are constantly happening in comparatively civilised countries. We do not refer to the coolie traffic at Macno—which is only a trifle less gross in, its organise tion and results than the slave trade of Africa—but to the cases of individual abduction and domestic slavery of which we hear so often among Asiatic nations. The China Mail remarked, only last week, that the special ordinances against kidnapping and selling women and girls for improper pur poses required to be supplemented by another, making the sale of the person for any purpose whatever, unlawful. "Phere is scarcely a case of any impo! tance brought before the Police Court, in which a woman is concerned, without some allusion to her sale,' by somebody to somebody, cropping up in the course of the proceedings. Sometimes she is bought as a servant, at other times asa wife or a concubine. But whatever the object of her purchase, it generally turns out that she is a most unwilling party to the bargain." Of course no such right over the person can be recogi\ised in Hongkong Courts but in dealing with a people who fully recognise such right—the right of parents to sell their children, and of buyers to transfer their property, it is not sufficient to ignore, it is necessary to prohibit. The custom otherwise continues, and submission to custom will prevent more than a small number of slaves seeking relief in the Courts. This sale of the person is far more common in Kwantung than the North, and doubtless occurs as often on British territory as on the mainland.
The Shanghai Mixed Court, however, also gives frequent instances of abduction. Only last week three cases were brought up—two on one day. On the 9th a man was committed on the charge of kidnapping a Ind; and on the 11th, a husband charged a friend with the abduction of his wife. He had left said friend in his house on the previous afternoon, and when he returned found his wife and two children, a quantity of clothing, and $20 in specie all gone. In another case a woman was charged with stealing a girl aged 17 from a house in the Maloo. She had been seen decoying the latter into a tea shop once or twice, and now her husband and the girl have disappeared together; probably some intrigue has been wrought out, and the abduction or dopement effected for a consideration.
Chinese law is very severe against kidnapping, while tolerant of domestic slavery; but the administrative power is inefficient in this, as in most other respects. The frequency of the practice, and the ease with which a panic may be got up on the subject, prove a strange feeling of insecurity. If China were not a land of contradietions, we should wonder how her legislaters fail to see that, by sanctioning domestic slavery, they keep alive the feeling which leads to abduction and kidnapping.
Abduction has very nearly died out in Europe, with the gradual scattering or absorption of those people of eastern descent, the Gypsies, who were most prone to the practice. Newspapers, railways and telegraphs have been too much for a people who like quiet nooks, and for a practice to which rapidity of communication is fatal. But young Ellangowan was not the only' child stolen in the last century. Slavery is essentially a savage instinct, and must die out before advancing. civilisation. Tu the countries where civilisation is highest—in England and France—ithas most completely disappeared; in the countries where civilisation is lowest— in Africa and Polynesia—men who profess civilisation but are not touched by it, find the most Inerative fields for their savage traffic. The semi-civilised countries of Asin exhibit a transitional form of slavery, removed from the more {cruel type, but still recognised in the modified form we find in China, JAPANESE DIPLOMACY AT PEEING, The recognition of an insurgent State as an independent nation by its former So-verein is an event of historic interest, as the consummation of a successful revolution, The first appearance of a Netherlands envoy atthe Escurial, of an American at St. James's, were hardly more significant of rerolution than the reception of a Japanese Ambassador by the Emperor of China. If that recognition of the indepen-dance and equality of Japan was not a renunciation of claims to Japanese fealty by this empire, it was, at least, an abandonment of arrogant claims of supremacy, and an evidence that China is conscious that a new era has dawned on this part of the world.
The circumstances attendant on this event are noteworthy, some of which we are at liberty to place on record, Japan had concluded 2 Treaty with China on the model of those which China had made with European Powers and the United States. t remained for her to return the document ratified, and this she elected to do by her Secretary of State for Foreign affairs, who was directed to quit his post for a time, and to proceed to Peking as Ambassador, and after the exchange of treaties to give to-the Emperor of China in person a letter from the Emperor of Japan congratulating Tung-Che on his marriage and accession to the throne.
Japan seems to have been fortunate in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.