452 THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 17TH NOVEMBER, 1866.
Your Petitioners feel quite satisfied that with Your Excellency's great sense of justice, the above facts although but very imperfectly brought to Your Excellency's notice will suffice to convince Your Excellency that some inodification is required, in order to render the working of this Ordinance unoppressive to the honest and innocent Trader.
The next Ordinance to which Your Petitioners would respectfully desire to draw Your Excellency's attention is Number 7 of 1866, "The Victoria Registration Ordinance 1866," which, though well adapted to insure the health, comfort and security of the Colonists, is, in some respects, open to objections; and Your Petitioners therefore entreat that Your Excellency will permit them to explain their views on the subject.
In the first place Your Petitioners gather from the Ordinance that the term "Householder” shall in the first instance be the Tenant of the whole of any building, and, as such he is required under clause 3 of Section VI and under Section VIII to report the name and occupation of any person renting any portion of such house, and also any change in such tenancy.
In the cases of houses carrying on a large business this requirement might at all times be practicable to comply with; but, in the cases of houses where a small business is carried on (and these form the large majority of Tenements in the Colony,) it must often be a matter of extreme difficulty to comply with this part of the Ordinance.
Your Excellency may not be aware that a great number of the houses in which tradesmen and others carry on their business in the lower floor is generally let to a person who keeps a shop,- whilst the first and second floors are let to various persons in rooms of which there may be as many as 10 on each floor, and, as the stay of such persons is at all times most uncertain, and there are continual changes of occupants of these compartments much of the time of such "Householder," (who can but ill afford to leave his small business,) as also of the officers of the Registrar General's Departinent will be taken up in recording these changes.
If the difficulty is great with the "Householder" living in the house, who is himself a Tenant, that difficulty is greatly increased in the case of the "Householder" who may happen to be Landlord, and, who having let the whole of the compartments to different persons, only visits the house at the end of each month to collect his rents. He then finds that during the month some one or more of such occupants have left the house without either giving notice or paying rent, and that probably some other person, by arrangement, with the outgoing tenant, but without the Landlord's knowledge has taken possession of the vacated compartment. These are things of daily occurrence in houses occupied by the poorer classes, who form the large portion of the fluctuating population of the Colony; and Your Petitioners foresee great loss of time to the poorer shopkeeper "Householder" in making reports, and great hardship by the frequent infliction of Fines both upon him as well as upon the Landlord "Householder" for breaches of this part of the Ordinance, which will require their constant and utmost vigilance to avert.
But Your Petitioners would most earnestly crave leave to direct Your Excellency's serious consideration to Sections XVII, XVIII, and XIX, which Your Petitioners look upon as being fraught with evil and hardship.
By Section XVIII, whenever any offence shall have been committed against any of the Four Ordinances mentioned in Section XVII, and when the offender, being only a casual resident, and not the Householder, cannot be found, the amount of the absent offender's fine is made payable by the innocent Landlord, he being under such circumstances the "Householder." Your Petitioners humbly conceive this enactment to be unreasonably hard on an innocent man. Your Petitioners have always heard it stated that it is a common axiom amongst the British people that it were better that nine guilty persons should escape than that one innocent man should be punished. To punish the Landlord for an offence committed without his knowledge by a casual resident in his house, and who had made good his escape, does not appear to Your Petitioners to be consistent with the just principle involved in the above good maxim. The remedy given by the latter part of the Section to the Landlord would be utterly useless, who would be unable to recover the amount of such fine from one who had already escaped from justice, or, who if he were to return, it would be necessary to sue for the amount even if he were able to pay it.
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But if such a hurtful law is brought to bear upon an innocent man in the absence of the guilty one what can be said of the case where (according to Section XVII) the guilty man being actually present, and who upon conviction cannot, or will not, pay the Fine inflicted on him is allowed to go at large without any punishment whatever, and the innocent man (the Landlord) who had never heard anything of the offence being committed, is called upon to pay the amount of the Fine! all Four of the Ordinances referred to in Section XVII it is provided that where the party convicted any of the offences therein contained is unable to pay the Fine inflicted that he shall in default thereof suffer Imprisonment with or without hard labor. Your Petitioners most respectfully beg to submit, that when this law becomes known in the Colony it will amount to an inducement to the lower classes to commit offences under the Ordinances named, especially those of Number 14 of 1844, and Number 12 of 1857, which they may do with impunity, without the fear of punishment, since whatever may be
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