I would have been warranted in applying personally to the several Consular Officers to know their opinions on a question of this nature.
In recommending to the Imperial Post Office that the proposition should be favourably entertained, I had confined myself entirely to the view that this Government took of the proposal, and I was anxious to put Your Excellency, at the earliest possible moment, in a position to express your own views upon it. These Postal Agencies already cost the Colonial Government close on $10,000 a year, and it is doubtful whether this sum is recouped from the Postage collected. They are rapidly dropping behind the requirements of the day, yet, though this Colony has gradually more than doubled the expenditure it accepted with the control of the Agencies twenty years ago, the Imperial Post Office refuses to make any contribution towards their improvement.
If these Post Offices are to be maintained with even a semblance of efficiency, a further considerable increase of expenditure is at once and urgently called for. And it would appear that the improvement would have to be effected at the sole cost of this Colony. Besides this somewhat undesirable position, the control of these Agencies, accepted very unwillingly in the first instance, naturally exposes this Government to the representations and complaints of gentlemen to whom tasks are assigned which it is impossible they should discharge with any degree of satisfaction to themselves; to complaints from the public on matters in which this Colony can exercise no effective control; and to a number of questions in which Hong Kong is really in no way concerned.
(Signed) I St. March
Administering the Government.