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native craft, the East River at that point being swift and shallow. At present, therefore, the communication with this thriving and populous district is circuitous and tedious. Its value to Hong-Kong would be very great if brought within easy access, as it would lead to a development of trade and a probable increase in the labour supply of the Colony, a matter of some moment.
It is therefore eminently desirable that the opening of Walchow to British trade should not be deferred until the doubtful period of the general acceptance by the Treaty Powers of the Provisions of Article VIII of the Mackey Treaty; and the Committee will be glad if you will be good enough to represent to the Foreign Office the importance to the Colony of Hong-Kong and to British trade of pressing the Chinese Government to agree to this stipulation of the Treaty being carried into effect simultaneously with the opening of Kongmoon.
Inseparably connected with this question of opening Walchow to foreign trade, as I hope presently to show, is the larger and more important one of the immediate construction of the long projected Kowloon-Canton Railway. It is universally felt in this Colony and by all the British residents in Canton that it is of the highest importance to British interests that this line should be completed before the Hankow-Canton section of the great trunk railway of China is constructed. The latter is now being actively prosecuted by the American-Belgian Syndicate, to whom the concession was granted; but up to the present moment the British Syndicate, who obtained the right to continue the line from Canton to Kowloon, have given no sign of activity in connection therewith.
The Committee feel strongly that the interests both of this Colony and of British trade are being endangered by this delay, and that British prestige is also suffering from the apparent want of enterprise on the part of the British Syndicate. There is, moreover, in the background a further but no less real danger, to which the late Governor of Hong-Kong (Sir Henry Blake) forcibly alluded in his farewell speech to the community, to
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