i
!
:
521
administration would probably be more than counterbalanced by the necessity of paying free labour to do much of the
work, such as road-repair, etc., now done by prisoners.
I would suggest also that with the reduction to such a large extent of the size of the public service, the auditing of the accounts might be entrusted to the Naval Paymaster on the island, who would doubtless be ready to undertake it in return for a small allowance. Perhaps some $800 might be saved in this way.
By cutting down all expenses to a minimum it
might be possible to reduce expenditure by as much as
$70,000, after allowing for the fact that an officer has
been engaged as Financial Assistant at a salary £100 above
that provided in the Estimates.
26.
On the other hand there would be a consider-
able loss of revenue from the territory. Practically all
the Land-tax and Road-tax would be lost, as would the fees for registration of transfers of land, the fees from the salt-pane, a great part of the cart-tax, much of the opium revenue and a considerable proportion of the receipts from the wine monopoly, fines and Court fees and various licences. It is difficult to give any figures, even approximate, but it would probably not be safe to reckon on losing much less than $60,000 of the present revenues.
The financial effect of this reduction of the area of the
territory would therefore appear scarcely to be sufficiently
favourable to make it worth while to adopt this course.
A possible modification of this alternative
which would avoid any difficulty in obtaining control of
the waters necessary to the Navy (and also the small
difficulty as to the lighthouse at Chao Pei Tsui) would be
to retain a narrow strip of the coast along the whole of
the Bay. This would involve additional expenditure but
that might be covered by additional revenue, so that from
the
27.