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authority - For the Government of this Colony, as well as of the other Crown Colonies, has been (and still is) practically autocracy. It is, as an eminent French statesman recently remarked, "one of the few despotisms yet remaining in the world"; tempered, moreover, only by the supervision of the Colonial Minister in London, at the distance of half the globe.
6. It should be clearly understood in England that the utmost efforts of successive Colonial Ministers at home, and of successive Governors and other functionaries on the spot, can now do no more than mitigate, they cannot altogether remove, the evils resulting from the want of foresight, and from the neglect, or supineness of the first founders of Hongkong.
Forty years ago, this island, when first acquired by the British Crown, through a treaty with China, was uninhabited and unvisited, save occasionally by a few wandering pirates and fishermen. It was virtually a tabula rasa in the hands