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HENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE
property in Victoria, a smaller rate being levied in out-stations. This tax yields annually about $470,000, of which over $350,000 are contributed by the Chinese and the balance by all the other nationalities combined. The petitioners, who are not in some instances British, and who do not in many cases contribute directly to the taxes, claim "the common right of Englishmen to manage the local affairs and control the expenditure of the Colony." They have, however, carefully omitted to point out that the local affairs include Chinese affairs of which, as has been stated, they are generally ignorant and which the Chinese have shown no desire that the British merchants and other residents should manage, and to indicate that to the expenditure of the Colony of which they desire the control they contribute a very small portion. Petitioners do not surely wish to maintain that Britishers have an inherent right to control all expenditure be their contributions to the revenue however small! It would be interesting to know in what period of our constitutional history such a right has been asserted to be allowed."4 Lockhart went on to state that there was one male adult Englishman to every 160 adult Chinese and that the British population in Hong Kong was by no means a permanent one: 'the number of persons to quote the petition "who have passed large portions of their lives in the Colony" is very small. Their object in coming to the Colony is to acquire wealth and to return to Great Britain as soon as they possibly can. The most telling point made by Lockhart was that it is not surprising that knowledge of Chinese, their customs and their peculiar requirements should be a sealed book to the British resident, whose intercourse with the Chinese is of the most limited nature, being almost exclusively confined to a discussion of markets, goods, and prices carried on a jargon called “pidgin” English.'16
Lockhart's main argument, which was endorsed by the Governor in a despatch to the Secretary of State, was that a small group of European businessmen could not be allowed to exercise control over a mainly Chinese population; that this would be both unjust and unacceptable to the Chinese themselves; and that the Hong Kong government had a moral obligation to safeguard the legitimate interests of a predominantly Chinese population. The petition was rejected.
Lockhart's rise in the colonial service, as I have stated, was rapid. In 1889 he was gazetted an official member of the Legislative