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THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND
QUESTIONS BEFORE THE LEGIS. | to secure as good a percentage of recoveries
LATIVE COUNCIL.
(Daily Press, 31st August.) Thursday's meeting of the Legislative Council was awaited, as we have already said, with no little interest, principally owing to the series of questions standing in the name of the Hon. T. H. WHITEHEAD. All of these involved subjects of importance to the general welfare of the Colony and its inhabitants. It cannot be said that the answers produced by the Government were for the most part of a nature calculated to satisfy those desirous to be informed. In one instance, that of question 4–when Mr. WHITEHEAD asked for a return of the number of building collapses since January, 1895, the owners' names, the number of deaths, enquiries, and prosecutions, the causes of the collapses, and the precautious to be taken in future-Mr. CHATHAM Was unable to prepare an answer in time for the mecting, but promised all available informa- tion hereafter. The answers to the other questions may be glanced at briefly.
With regard to the New Territory, the first answer shows that the Land Court has had its hands full, and considering the size of the staff employed has used its time well. The answeras to expenditure on the Territory brings out only more strongly the unsatis- factory state of affairs to which we have frequently called attention before. So far from the anticipations of the Hon. J. H. STEWART LOCKHART in his report to Down. ing Street in 1898 having been fulfilled, v. find an expenditure of $736,571.34 against a revenue of $41,014.82 for three years. And this is the New Territory in which no difficulty was expected in raising from the beginning an annual revenue large enough to meet the cost of administration! It is plain that a very large error has been made. The Chinese land-holders have been suffered to escape even provisional payment of rent, at the expense of Hongkong, and a source of revenue to the Government has hitherto been thrown away.
Mr. WHITEHEAD's third question dealt with the discontent in the police force and the Press comments thereon. Captain Superintendent MAY was certainly within his rights in refusing to take notice of complaints made in other than the usual way. Nevertheless the discontent, as Captain MAY knows well, most certainly exists and the police force has been much damaged and weakened by it. Because all complaints have not been made through the official channels it is not shown that the police are mostly contented. Coupled with what we know of the state of affairs in the force, it means something very different, as indeed we have already indicated when discussing this question previously.
[September 9, 1901.
.con-
and in nothing has the Tsar NICHOLAS as they show in their own homes. It is an more thoroughly fulfilled the expectations open secret that certain very prominent of his well-wishers than in his unfailing officials are in sympathy with the proposal attention to the duties of his exalted station. to allow the departure to the mainland of Unfortunately, probably from some the sick Chinese, proper precautions being genital defect as well as from the force of taken to avoid the spread of infection. In circumstances, his very virtues have been these circumstances, with the support of the his worst enemies, and the Tear NICHOLAS community, our authorities would be justi-II must to be relegated to that unfortunate fied in urging on the home Government a category of princes who have to bear the reconsideration of the decision given this burden, not only of their own deficiencies, year. It is certain that the real facts of the but of the crimes of those who have gone case are not appreciated in Downing Street. before. A friend of peace, u hater of wan- The succession to Mr. OBMSBY's post at ton aggression, a lover of freedom, and a the head of the Public Works Department conscientious administrator of justice, he has was the matter of Mr. WHITEHEAD's last by the tyranny of fate been made the agent question. It seems to us, and we know that for inaugurating a system whereby every this opinion is shared by many experts, one of these has been set aside. His desire that what the Public Works Department for peace brought about the travesty of a want is not so much a new and more highly "Peace Congress "at the Hague, whose only paid head, but a larger and more adequate effect has been to inflame the passions of staff. It would be useless to import into the world, and render the continuance even the Colony a man of long experience and of the questionable peace prevailing at the end high standing, at a larger salary than has of the century, a work of gigantic responsi- been paid before, and then to leave him as bility. His dislike for wanton aggression waS short-handed as his predecessors. We instrumental in bringing on the massacre of must spend our money on securing a suffi. Blagoveschensk and the unprovoked seizure ciently large staff before we get out an
of Manchuria. His love of free institutions expensive Director to put at its bend.
has ended in the faithless destruction of the constitution of the Grand Duchy of Finland, which his predecessors and himself bound themselves by the most solemn of oaths to respect and finally his conscientious ad- ministration of justice bas led him in the face of his own ordinances to punish with forced military service the boy students of St. Petersburg, who had remonstrated against the breach of promises given to them by himself in person at the beginning of his reign. Even his marriage to a princess, amiable, virtuous and accomplished, which the world looked upon as the crowning joy of an amiable monarch, such as he at one time promised to be, has added to his bitter cup of woe. With a superstitious craving for male offspring exceeding even that of the Chinese themselves, four daugh- ters only have blessed the prayers and contrition of the Tsar, and NICHOLAS II, brought up in and surrounded by the meshes of a faith as yet but little removed from the primitive ideas of n Vladimir, sees in the fact the judgment of Heaven, and frightened by the terrors of the Church, commits those very crimes which church- men in all ages have forced upon their unwilling votaries. By such means, and with such intentions, always of the best, the Tsar NICHOLAS II has succeeded not
To one more point at Thursday's meeting we wish to call attention, and it is to be found in the remarks made by the Chairman of the Finance Committee. Mr. STEWART LOCKHART said with reference to the votes for Roads and Markets :—
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Hon. Members will be glad to see that provision is being made for the roads in "Victoria. I am sure we all agree it is necessary that great attention should be paid to our roads, and to have them as satisfactory as possible. We all desire to see the roads in this Colony a credit to the Colony and to those who are in any way responsible for them."
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And again
"As Hon. Members are aware, a great deal has been said lately about the want "of market accommodation in the Colony, "and I feel sure the vote will be most
heartily recommended."
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We think that the Colonial Secretary must have smiled to himself as he made these remarks. We should certainly all of us desire to see
creditable roads in the Colony and "most heartily recommend' vote for two extra markets. We are also glad to learn that the Government shares (at last) our views.
$1
A
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A THREATENED DANGER FROM only in losing the confidence of all classes
RUSSIA.
(Daily Press, 3rd September.) When the Emperor NICHOLAS II ascended the throne of Russia, and married the daughter of the Princess ALICE, there were The point in connection with the fifth and many who thought that the time had come sixth questions is one of much importance when Russia would willingly enter the comity to this Colony. Hongkong being outside of the nations of Europe. Through evil the terms of the Venice Convention of 1897, report and good report his father ALEXANDER it becomes legitimate to ask whether we had carried on the efforts at reform begun should allow sick Chinese in times of epide- by his father the Tsar ALEXANDER II. The mic to go home to the mainland with the task was an enormous one, and needed a consent of the Chinese Government. When fearless and powerful mind; ALEXANDER III, the question was referred to His Majesty's though perhaps not n clever sovereign, was Government this year, the result was a a resolute man, and understood his people refusal to allow the suggested course to be well. Though hated even more than his taken. Nevertheless it is an undoubted unfortunate father by the reactionaries and fact that many Chinese in an early stage socialists, he won the confidence of the of the disease did get away from the nation at large, and under his rule Bussia Colony and some even have come back made such enormous strides that, had bis recovered, to our own knowledge; doubt-son and successor known how to follow in less some of our readers have also come across such cases. We are unable at the present in Hongkong either to prevent the Burreptitious departure of sick natives or to treat them when they remain adequately
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his footsteps, he would have found the road metalled, rolled and sanded. We have said known how," not in any sense of dispar- agement; no more upright and conscientious monarch ever sat on the Throne of Russia,'
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of his subjects, but in incurring the positive hatred of many of the most influential. The legal classes, always most influential in Rus- sia, have viewed with dismay his attempts to re-introduce the age of the themistes, and to supersede the written law by the inspired "doom" of the sovereign': the student class, from whom the future legislators of the Empire have to come, has been thoroughly alienated by the attempts of the Tsar to introduce the law of caprice; and to punish them for artificial crimes made such only by the momentary fad of the Tear. The nobles impoverished by the acts of his grandfather listen with complacency to the rumbling of the coming storm; while the army itself whose allegiance to the Tsar once took the form of a religious reverence to the person of their Little Father " now look with undisguised contempt on a ruler whose amiable weaknesses have dis- credited the namesake of the grim NICHOLAS who dared Europe in the Crimea-and all the more that amidst his other weaknesses he was the first of the Tsars to hold out service in the Army of Holy Russia as a punishment for traitorous crimes. Thus it