SECOND MEMORANDUM.
SIR,
HONGKONG, 20th March, 1902.
I have the honour to submit to His Excellency a resumé of the conclusions which I have arrived at during a somewhat short stay in the Colony investigating plague.
2. The material for the study of this disease is mainly taken from the past, owing to the fact that, during my stay in the Colony, only a few cases of plague have occurred. The conditions and circumstances which favour the annual recurrence and epidemicity of the disease have, however, been more or less present as in preced- ing years.
3. The population of Hongkong is mainly Cantonese, and there is a stream of people passing continually from the towns and villages of the Province of Kwart- tung and adjoining territory to Hongkong and vice versa. This continuous circulation by steamers and by junks goes on throughout the year, but is more particularly great in volume at and after the New Year and again at the tombs festival in April. It is between the New Year and the date of the last return from the festival that Hongkong incurs a serious risk of infected persons, infected clothes, and infected rats being brought into the Colony, varying in different years appar- ently with the amount of plague in these Chinese villages and towns. Later the risk is reversed by infected persons, things and rats, being carried in boats from Hongkong to the mainland. This was the case in 1894, and it repeats itself in other years. In a little over a fortnight, the Chinese will be going home to celebrate the tombs festival.
4. One of the circumstances that tend to keep up the recurrence of plague, is this intimate intercourse with infected areas; another is that Hongkong is a great emporium, with hongs and godowns filled with stores and infested with rats suscep- tible to the disease; a third is the poor class of people of which the greater part of Hongkong consists; and a fourth is the conditions under which a large proportion of this class live. It is essentially a labouring class, floating in its character and non-residential, mostly consisting of males, with their wives and families in the vil- lages of China and, like all people of this class in Eastern towns, living under very insanitary conditions. Hongkong is peculiar in possessing a greater proportion of these insanitary classes and of housing them on a smaller space than other towns. In the early days, owing to the limitation of available land for building purposes and the rapid increase of population, a system came into vogue, when sanitation was considered of no particular account in the East, whereby the inhabitants were crowded into houses built close to one another and heightened as necessity arose without reference to the admission of fresh air and sunlight into the rooms, and each room was subdivided by partitions into cubicles or cabins, generally without windows, which were used separately as a house for several inmates. This system of housing once introduced has continued to the present day, and is permitted everywhere except on the ground floors and in houses in lanes less than 15 feet wide, where cubicles are only allowed on the top floor. It has been permitted to continue even in Kowloon, on the opposite side of the harbour. The result is that, in the older part of the town, there is a greater population per acre than in any town in the East I am acquainted with. In No. 5 District, for instance, there is over 840 persons per acre, which is more than three times the worst and most crowded area of Calcutta. Apart from too many houses being erected on too small a space, the evils attendant on the overcrowding of a dirty class of people are accent- uated by the kind of buildings erected. It is possible to erect high buildings
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