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If I venture to offer some remarks on the proposition to claim a sum of £20,000 per annum from the Revenues of this Colony in aid of the Military Expenditure upon it.
2.
As a year must elapse before this claim can take effect and as there may be somewhat in the following considerations (founded on local experience) calculated to influence the final decision, I cannot but think it my duty to put them forward.
3. It seems to me that two principal questions present themselves—1. Is the claim equitable? and 2. Its equity granted, is its enforcement warranted by the financial condition of the Colony?
4. The equity of the claim rests first on the use of the Troops. If these be required here for local purposes, such as the suppression of Civil tumult, or the preservation of internal order as in "Ceylon, Mauritius, and the principal Australian Colonies," nothing more can be said, and we need only pass to the second question proposed.
5. But ever since the foundation of the Colony, there has been only one instance in which the Colonial Authorities have applied to the Military for assistance. I allude to a riot in the City of Victoria in October 1856 when a Company of the 59th Regiment was called out, without, however, their more active service being required. This it must be remembered was during an exceptional state of things, which since our nearly four years' occupation of Canton and the altered demeanour of the Chinese provincial Government is not likely to recur.
6. Services at fires have always been performed promptly and efficiently by the Troops, but these must be considered rendered by them as Citizens more than as Soldiers.
7. There is no Police duty done by them; they are not put on Treasure Escort as to my recollection in Ceylon, and the only Colonial duty done by them is furnishing occasional guards of honor, firing Salutes of Ceremony, and mounting guard over two buildings the property of the Colonial Government.
8. This last is the only service that can be said to be purely Colonial.
9. On the other hand, Hongkong has always been (certainly for the last seven years) the Military point d'appui whence Troops have been sent to various parts of Chinese territory for the protection of Imperial interests. Our Military force furnished a Garrison for the Macao Fort in the Canton River when taken by Sir Michael Seymour in 1856; it supplied the principal part of the Land Force at the capture of Canton in the end of 1857; it was the feeder of the Garrison in occupation there till the evacuation of Canton in 1861. In 1860-1, the Peking expedition was organized here and ever since that time the Colony has been used as the Military Head Quarters from which the detachments at Shanghae, Tientsin, &c. have been stored and recruited.
10. From recent advices, I may include Japan as a future service under this head.
All these services were strictly Imperial and had no local object or result.
12. It would appear then that so far as the use of the Troops is concerned, there is little claim on the Colony for their support.
13. Their intended transfer to Kowloon (see Secretary of State's Despatch No.94 of 18th July 1863) is to a certain extent proof of their not being urgently required in Hongkong.
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14. These remarks regard the use of the Troops as an internal security to the Island, but as concerns protection from an external enemy, the principal source of danger, we have it laid down by Lord Stanley at the foundation of the Colony (November 1843) that this is dependent mainly on our Naval superiority, while the Committee on Colonial Military Defences have said that "so far as assistance from the Mother Country is concerned, the chief thing which most of our Colonies must look to for defence against Foreign enemies is our Navy."
15. Moreover, Hongkong being the only British territory on the Coast of China, and the presence of a Naval Squadron here being a permanent and not a temporary necessity, as is the case with the Military, one half of whom are at this moment engaged on foreign soil, it follows that Hongkong must be the Head Quarters of the Navy in the China Seas, and hence a closer connection must exist between the Colony and the Navy than between the Colony and the Army.
16. My inference from this is that if a claim on Colonial Funds be advanced, it should be made on account of the Naval Squadron rather than the Military Garrison.
17. In support of this view, I may mention that when it became necessary in June last to look to the defences of the Colony, it was to the Admiral and not to the General that I applied, and the only branch of the Military Service which it was proposed to employ was the Artillery to man the Batteries suggested and selected by the Commanding Royal Engineer, of which I shall say more presently.
18. But putting aside the use of the Troops, or rather granting that they are here for local purposes or that they will be in future made more use of locally (in which case I presume the same control over them would be given to the Governor as is given in Ceylon), it yet forms a question in view of the two facts—1. that the Colony was founded in furtherance of an Imperial purpose and its Garrison is maintained for "general national objects" [Mr Elliot's memorandum]. 2. that the Imperial trade for the encouragement of which it was founded, is so important financially to the Mother Country that one item alone (the Tea Duties) furnishes, or did recently furnish a tithe of the whole Imperial Revenue—whether the local resources of this Colony should be impounded to the certain hindrance of its advancement and success.
19. Before proceeding to the second point, I would remark on the argument used that Hongkong has cost the Mother Country £273,000 during the first fourteen years of its existence. If the Mother Country wanted an establishment like Hongkong and by establishing it, it is proved that she did want it, she could only get it by paying for it or by making others pay for it, and this last she did. Up to the end of 1846, the (necessarily nominal) Parliamentary Grants were really stopped out of the Indemnity Fund extracted from the Chinese Government under the Nanking Treaty. Though nominally voted by Parliament, no portion of it came out of the pocket of the Taxpayer of the British Isles, and in the years that intervened from 1846 to the date of the cessation of the Parliamentary Grant, the sums voted were insignificant compared with the enormous Revenue derived by Great Britain and India from the China Trade, for the encouragement of which, as I have said before, the Colony of Hongkong was established.
20. Earl Grey when Secretary of State for the Colonies (Despatch No.94 of 3rd February 1849) distinctly absolved the Colony from all responsibility for the sums expended on it previously to 1st April 1848, and since then the sums granted have amounted only to £130,900, or less than half of what is now brought up against it.
21.
Let us now turn to the second principal question which I have proposed. Is this Military contribution warranted by the financial condition of the Colony?
22. Our estimated Surplus at the present moment is a little over $440,000, while the Surveyor General has handed me the enclosed memorandum of the works in progress and under contemplation; it will be seen that they, amounting to $482,371, more than absorb the entire surplus and still have no reference to Kowloon, necessary extension of Roads, Drains, Repairs, &c., on each and all of which the expenditure will be considerable.
23. But it may be said this is the existent surplus, and as it has grown, it doubtless will grow; I enclose in correction of such a notion a Return showing the Premium on Land sold during the last ten years, and this, it must be borne in mind, is the main source of the Surplus; it will be seen that the large amount in hand is the produce of Premium during the 3 years 1860, 1861, and 1862, while during the current year 1863, so completely has this source of Revenue been exhausted that the following result is shown.
1860. 1861. 1862. 1863.
$94,342. $167,536. $142,602. $6,490.
24. I should add that the Estimate for 1863 from Premium on Land was $72,000; and I presume that this high figure was calculated with reference to Kowloon, no intelligence of the settlement of which has reached the Colony up to this date; but however this may be, the fact is evident that less than an eleventh of the Estimate for the year has been realized, and that Premium on land will not henceforward be so profitable a source of Revenue as it has been.
25. Thus much as to Receipt; as to disbursement, I would note that the Surplus in past years has not been used principally owing to the inadequacy of the Surveyor General's Department for undertaking the necessary Public Works; the money therefore has remained in hand (or I should say at interest) but it has not the less been forestalled and unavailable, and is still so.
26. And here I may call attention to the memorandum above enclosed of Public Works proposed and certainly required, and especially to the Mint and to the two Gaols in Victoria and on Stone Cutters Island. Of the Mint, I would only say that the benefit to be derived from it, so far as I can see, though I admit I write without a perfect knowledge of the subject, will be entirely or mainly Imperial, while as to the Gaols, I would point out that their inmates are not properly speaking people belonging to the Colony, but chiefly pirates, and Chinese belonging to the mainland and that while their punishment is a sequence of our accidental position, and in aid of those general public interests for the conservation and furtherance of which I assume the Colony to have been originally founded, the heavy expense of the custody and maintenance of these criminals falls altogether upon the Revenues of Hongkong.
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