267
greivance before him in the most respectful terms.
as
We beg most respectfully to point out to Your Lordship that the Honourable the Treasurer admits that we have satisfactorily performed our duties in the past. Since we have fulfilled our duties satisfactorily hitherto "was acknowledged by the Honourable Treasurer we humbly submit that it is hardly likely that we cannot continue to fulfil
"duties satisfactorily if promoted to posts, seeing that we have already gained very considerable experience in the department, and for that reason we may say that there is nothing in the work to be done by Messrs Cunha and Remedios that we are not able to do as well as these gentlemen.
We have been all some years in the service of the Government. We all entered it expecting promotion in regular course, and ultimately to be entered on pensions in proportion to the salary earned by our latest promotion. It is most discouraging to us and to all Chinese and others getting English education and trying to qualify for public employment, to find that men are brought in from outside and put into offices capable of filling and for which we have been qualifying in the junior posts under our heads.
We beg that we may at least have the chance of a trial by being promoted probationally for some time. If the result shows that we are incompetent, then we will have no ground for complaint, but we have good hopes that the result will be in our favour.
We would respectfully submit that in making appointments to Government posts, generally, if not always, preference is given to Government servants rather than to outsiders; how much more should this be so when we are already working in the same Department, in the hope of being promoted when opportunity offers, and feeling naturally much discouraged at the disappointment of these hopes.
We crave Your Lordship's permission for us to point out that the last three of us have already suffered once before from not being promoted, through the transference of Lo Cheung from the Victoria College to the fourth Clerkship in the Treasury, thus stopping the departmental promotion naturally looked for by us at that time.
Under these circumstances we most humbly pray that Your Lordship will take our case into your gracious consideration and remove from our minds the feeling of discouragement and disappointment under which we labour.
We have