350
}
Your Petitioners beg to append a comparative
statement showing the present rate of servants' wages, house rents, school fees and the prices of commodities forming the necessaries of life, as compared with those
(
ruling in 1901 (the last general increase of salaries), and
with those obtaining last year. It will be seen that in
the short space of eight months house renta have gone up by 20 to 50 per cent., and the prices of firewood and rice by 47 and 541 per cent. respectively. If past experience can be taken as a criterion, there is no likelihood of the prices of commodities dropping materially in the near future; on the contrary, there are indications of their
still advancing higher than they are.
5. The sudden and unprecedented rise in house rent (which, in some cases, absorbs more than one-third of your Petitioners' salaries) has been caused by the large influx of Chinese from Canton and by wealthy men from the neigh- bouring Provinces purchasing landed property in the Colony
at high prices. The "boom" in house property has more or
less subsided but rents have so far not gone down in sympathy, the reason being that owners of houses are try ---
ing to exact a sufficient return for the large sums of
Unfortunately money they have sunk in their investments.
your Petitioners cannot avoid this heavy drain on their emoluments by sending their families out of the Colony, for
the majority of them were born and have their permanent
homes in the Colony; and, in any case, the conditions of
service of all of them are such as to preclude them from
having their families elsewhere than in Hongkong.
6.
There exists in some quarters an idea, formed
apparently on insufficient data, that the salaries of the Hongkong Civil servants appointed locally compare favour- ably with those of 'local' clerks in the employ of mercan-
tile firms in the Colony, regard being had of the pension