Wood
19. I have drawn beside the curtain sufficiently to enable Your Lordship a most lamentable picture, and I trust Your Lordships, -after a perusal of the Inclosures - will see the necessity of Enquiring into and abating the evils I have disclosed. During the last year of Sir Arthur Kennedy's administration the town, had the reputation of being the Cleanest in the East, And there is no reason why it should not regain its old reputation The Evils are all preventable, not by the act of public ingratitude which it is intended to perpetrate in the dismissal of Dr Smyth from the Sanitary Surveillance the Colony, but by a return to the principles of health and Cleanliness more in accordance with Oriental than those held by Governor Hennessy's present advisers.
20. The filthy Condition of the villages and sillages of Southern China, loathsome and revolting beyond all power of language to describe, arising out of a combination of ignorance and neglect on the part of the Authorities and objectionable personal habits on the part of the people, should surely demonstrate to His Excellency that in a British Colony like Hong Kong with so many European lives to be jeopardized it is not to the guild of native traders that the Executive should look for its sanitary Maxims. I cannot but think the wishes of Your Lordship would be more correctly...