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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
ment the thanks of the Chinese community for the sympathy, energy and promptitude with which it adopted measures to deal with the recent water situation.
We are under a special debt of gratitude to your Excellency for the very ready manner in which you met the appeals of the community, and for the solicitous regard you evinced for the suffer- ings of the poor in those trying days. The public is no less grateful to you, Sir, for the statesmanlike and marvellously successful way in which you have preserved the friendly relations with our great neighbour, notwithstanding the change of administration that has recently taken place in Canton. Your Excellency has, indeed, passed through another year of extremely arduous work and great anxiety. and I know that I am voicing the sentiments of all sections of the community when I express the wish that the short holiday which your Excellency is about to take may give you renewed health and reinforced vigour. (Applause).
HON. MR. W. E. L. SHENTON.-Your Excellency, I have listened with great interest to the Honourable Colonial Secretary's review of the Colony's finances. Hong Kong, the great Emporium of the Far East, has, as it were, completed its annual stock-taking, and is now able to take a review of the past, consider its present financial position and enter into arrangements for its future.
A surplus of $7,712,265 assets over liabilities is, on the face of it, a most satisfactory position, and one with which any Board of Directors would go before their shareholders with unmixed feelings of pride and confidence.
On the spur of the moment I have similar feelings, but will they stand searching inquiries-can we go before the tax-payers of the Colony and say "the finances of the Colony have in the past been administered to the best advantage," or is the Colony rather in the position of one who has year by year sold his wares, spent most of his profits, and kept the balance, but is without sufficient wares to do future successful trading-in other words, have the Government in the past so operated the Colony's finances as to keep up with the times and the progress of the Colony or are we now faced with large capital expenditure which we shall have difficulty in meeting; is our stock in trade or some of it either out of date or beyond repair?
On a careful retrospect of the position I am convinced that the matter is one for most serious consideration-in fact I go so far as to say that to bring our stock in trade up-to-date will require the expenditure of every large sums. How are we going to provide for this?
The Honourable the Colonial Secretary tells us that the Govern- ment has adopted a forward policy in its Budget for 1930, admittedly, he says, in services rather than in material works. I have scanned the draft Estimates and the Public Works Extraordinary Report for
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