500
The businesses carried on in it not only has the size and population of the Colony of Victoria largely increased by the occupations, especially Kowloon and Chan Ki-wan have grown from small fishing villages into important centres of trade with large and daily increasing populations.
This increase in wealth, in population, and in the extent and variety of the business transacted has added very largely to the ordinary and extraordinary police duties performed by the Inspectors.
If in 1871, their responsibilities were "peculiarly grave", and if it was then advisable that "Every inducement should be held out to attach and keep really capable and trustworthy men", their duties and responsibilities are graver and more extended now than they were then, and that capable and trustworthy men must be proportionally more valuable!
Although the number of inhabited houses and the population have largely increased, no addition has been made to the number of Inspectors since 1873.
On the other hand, new and additional duties have been imposed upon the existing Inspectors since 1871. At the outstations, they have to perform, without extra remuneration, the duties of Registrar of Births and deaths, and in Victoria and at the outstations, they have recently had transferred to them the dangerous and disagreeable...