40
It is a period of agitation, and the expression of public discontent, in order to confer on a growing and prosperous population the benefit of representative institutions in some shape or other. Such concessions come most gracefully when they are not extorted by clamour, or surrendered by necessity, but are the result of a calm survey of the present and the future. I do not recommend any very large infusion of the popular principle, but object to its utter exclusion in every shape, and from every department of government. I believe that exclusion acts perniciously on the Executive authority, which necessarily falls into habits of relaxation and routine, by being removed from a control alike useful in impelling right tendencies, and checking wrong ones.
And I see no reason whatever why the representative principle – conceded in some form or other in almost every colony under the Crown, - should be denied to Hongkong.
4.
The enlargement of Councils, by the sole introduction into them of a greater number of public functionaries, is objectionable, as it would be but the diffusion and consequent diminution of responsibility among the Executive body, whose functions, in my judgment, would be better performed by few than by many, and