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Appendix 46.
Letter to the Editor of the "Daily Press."
SIR,--The Bill for the incorporation of the “Pó Léung Kuk" Society is to come before the Legislative Council next Monday, and I beg leave to call attention to this matter in the hope that the bill will not be passed or, at all events, not in its present shape.
The expenses of the Government of this Colony are already high and nothing should be done to increase them. Apart, however, from the question of funds for the endow- ment of this Society, there are very grave reasons against "legal status" being conferred upon it. No such Society that I am aware of has a legal status either in England or America, Australian or other Colonies or Shanghai, and it would be an exceedingly bad precedent to commence such a thing here.
The Board and Committee of the Society are apparently to sit in private and are evidently to exercise police functions, seeing that the Ordinance provides for the loan of constables and detectives.
There is no security whatever that the Society's functions will be exercised properly and without injustice towards any whom the members of the Society or its employés may think proper to suspect, and neither the return of annual accounts and reports to the Colonial Secretary, nor the inspection of its premises by the Governor, nor the presidency of the Registrar-General, will in my opinion provide any such security.
It is to deal with the liberties of persons in this Colony and to establish a secret system of espionage over them, which is repugnant to the principles of British Govern- ment. It is in direct violation of the principles of that British liberty which purposely provides the great safeguard of publicity in all such matters.
The powers of the Society may be put to improper uses which may affect the liberty of the subject, and nothing of this kind should be allowed unless all its sittings be held in public.
The very fact that any body of men with a "legal status" may conduct in private, at their will and pleasure, investigations into the family and social concerns of the people, carries with it its own condemnation.
It will create an imperium in imperio, and there are those in this Colony, who think that we have quite enough of this already in the Registrar-General's department.
This Ordinance, if passed, will amount to a public confession and proclamation to the Chinese, and to the world, that the British Government, through its legitimate and publicly recognised machinery of police and open Courts of law, is unable to protect women and children, and condescends to resort to the unconstitutional method of creating a Society which, though not a secret one in name, practically operates as such.
This Society may terrorise over Chinese families, and the public will know nothing of it till much injury may have been done.
Although the members of the Boards of Direction and Committee, who would' probably all be respectable men, may none of them use their influence improperly, their subordinates or even individual members of the Society trading on the "legal status" may use their position to coerce people into acquiescence with their own personal schemes by threats of exercising the power of the Society.
In making laws legislators must count with human nature.