Enclosure!
To The Right Honorable
114
QUEEN'S COLLEGE, HONGKONG.
3 September 1894,
The Most Honble Marquess of Ripon, K.G. 8.0.8.1.
Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies.
Lord Ripon
18006
Red 15 GT
Having received a letter from the Colonial Secretary, notifying me that it has been decided to sever Queen's College from the Education Department, and place it under the management of a Board, I have the Honour to address Your Lordship on the subject.
In reply to my letter No 100 of 12 December 1891, Your Lordship stated that I was under a misapprehension, in supposing that there was any intention on the part of the Government, to remove the management of the College from the Head Master, in whose ability Your Lordship was pleased to express his confidence.
In that letter, I quoted from Dr Eitel's printed remarks in the China Review, to the effect that the Central School had assuredly assured its own status, then released from the leading strings of the Board; and pointed out the danger of reverting to an infantine stage, from which emancipation had been effected.
Assuming that Your Lordship's reasons for approving this serious change are of an urgent nature, that for me to set forth the dangers and difficulties in the way, would be useless and troublesome; I have the honour respectfully to submit for Your Lordship's consideration certain points that seem to me to the Formation and Personnel of the Board; and then to ask Your Lordship once more to relieve me of my present office before the proposed change is effected.
5. FORMATION of the BOARD
(1) The Head Master should be ex officio Chairman, in accordance with the precedent afforded by the management of several Colonial Colleges; and by the custom observed in this Colony in the formation of Committees, e.g., Observatory Commission presided over by the Director of the Observatory &c. This appears the more essential as the meetings of the Board to be effective should be held in the Head Master's Office, where speedy reference could be made to Books, Papers, and general Statistics.
(2) The other Members should be one Official, and one Unofficial Member of Legislative Council; one Chinese Justice of the Peace, really interested in education. I would suggest Mr Ng Yoyong, one of Dr Stewart's old scholars, and educated at Dollar College Scotland, who has several relations, pupils in Queen's College, and is Chairman of the Stewart Scholarship Trust; and Revd K.P. Chalmers, M.A. Cantab., Incumbent of the Cathedral Church, as his experience as a schoolmaster would be of great value in the deliberations of the Board.
(3) As the College has been severed from the Educational Dept, it will probably not be proposed to put the Inspector of Schools on the Board. In anticipation of the possibility of such an event, however, I submit that the known divergence between his and my views on Education, his personal animosity to myself and the Institution, are sufficient grounds against his nomination; as the whole hope of success attending the appointment of a Board depends upon its calm unruffled attitude, and its spirit of devotion to further the true interests of the College. I also submit that his nomination would prima facie, be suggestive of the credit given by Your Lordship to his libellous attacks on myself and the College; while the fact that in a few years (he was Vicar of Wanstead in 1860) his retirement from the Service may be...