[ XXIII]
may be seen by last year's returns which shew admissions of Europeans and Indians to the Civil Hospital to have been 934, against 223 Chinese. In other words, whilst the Chinese population is from 15 to 18 times as great as the Foreign, the admissions of Chinese to the Hospital were less than one-fourth of the whole.
20. Your Lordship may hence infer the large aggregate of misery, wretchedness and disease which must be either wholly or inadequately cared for in this city; and I believe there is no effective remedy for such an evil except inducing the Chinese, as I am doing, to build a suitable hospital and refuge, open to European surveillance but under Chinese management and direction, so that there may be no such reluctance to go there in the minds of the natives as that which generally prevents their voluntarily going to the Civil Hospital.
21. I trust the above details may satisfy your Lordship of the expediency of the decision taken by myself and my Executive Council to give every reasonable aid to the establishment of the proposed hospital. I have felt it a duty to make my explanations full and explicit, because as the money to be contributed by Government can only come from the Gambling Licence Fund, it is essential that I should prove the object to be one legitimately within the principles suggested for the application of that fund in my despatch No. 714 of the 8th instant.
I have, &c.,
The Right Honourable
RICHARD GRAVES MACDONNELL,
Governor.
EARL GRANVILLE, K.G.,
Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State.
(Extract from Governor's Despatch to the Secretary of State No. 714 of
21st June, 1869.)
10. Thus recent circumstances, which must form the subject of a separate communi- cation, have drawn my attention to the great amount of physical wretchedness and extraordinary moral obtuseness, if not actual depravity, which prevails amongst the Chinese in the treatment of their sick and dying. These evils are not met by the maintenancé of the existing Civil Hospital however well conducted that institution may be, and I am not aware of any nobler or more natural purpose to which a portion of the funds in question could be devoted than that of assisting in founding an institution to alleviate the sufferings of the race by which unfortunately that fund is created.