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facilities for its extension should not be found here, then the Colony will either retrograde or remain stationary.
In case strugong is not, I think, destined to become a great...
& produces nothing for either Export or consumption and is not capable of growing supplies sufficient to feed its inhabitants for one single day.
A Chinese Settlement with a population equal to half that of Canton or even a quarter - say 250,000. The Island has no natural advantages beyond good harbour happily situated at the Southern threshold of the Chinese empire and forming the entrance gate of its sea-board. It has neither, as it were, agriculture nor manufactures.
The population must therefore be fed by supplies and the numbers must, I conceive, be limited to the amount of fixed employment which can at all times be found here. If we could offer the opposite continent unlimited employment which would yield the settler even two meals a day - say of rice and fish with 1/2 a day for tobacco and luxuries, with