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photographs A and D the immediate removal of native villages
is not always necessary: but the extinction of the cultivation removes the raison d'être of the village and in most cases
the menfolk of the village have already been drawn to the
town. Moreover, the native village as a breeding ground for flies as well as mosquitoes is often as great a sanitary menace as the cultivation.
10.
It must be borne in mind that in the New
Territories private ownership has, owing to the facilities provided by our Crown Lease and land registration system, become very minutely sub-divided. Holdings of 0.01 acre are common, Under such conditions systematic development by individual owners is manifestly impracticable. A single owner in a single development block could (and often would) hold all the rest to ransom, and the costly work of providing roads, water and drainage cannot possibly be undertaken until, there is a certainty of development for at least a whole section comprising many blocks. dearly then the whole development scheme had to be taken into the hands of Government. Here the speculator stood in the path. If Government had to pay the prices ruling in the speculative ring, the cost was utterly beyond the resources of the public purse, the town pleming scheme was waste paper, and the appalling congestion of the Colony's population with its sanitary and social dangers must have continued. Even under the policy adopted, the financial possibility, indicated in the final sentence of paragraph 11 of my predecessor's despatch No.304 of the 5th August, 1925, has, oving to the quarrel with Canton become a probability, if
not a certainty.
11.
It must not be overlooked that the enhanced value of land in New Kowloon and other parts of the New
Opt
Territories, where developments taking place, is due largely
to