HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
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At a subsequent meeting of the Council the Attorney-General, the Hon. Sir Henry Berkeley, said: "The reasons why the Government introduce this Bill are that on further consideration it has appeared that all the objects aimed at by the Bill of 1902, principal among which is the supply of a sufficient quantity of water to the town of Victoria with the least possible waste, may be effected without incurring the hardships which the Bill of 1902 would be inevitably inflicting on a certain section of the community using water... Rider-mains are a means by which the supply of water can be regulated to blocks of houses as effectively as it can be by meters in the case of single houses."
From these quotations from Hansard it is clear that the principal object of the rider-main system was to detect and prevent waste. That object was iterated and reiterated by the Colonial Secretary and the Attorney-General of that day. After 26 years' operation no evidence has been adduced to prove that the system has failed of that object. It stands to reason that a system which is subject, as the rider-main system is, to severe restrictions for long periods at a time, almost annually, cannot but conserve materially our water supply.
It is very well to say, as it has been said by some, that there is bound to be waste in a system which supplies water free, for people are apt to be careless in the use of a thing for which they have not to pay. The matter is too important to the tens of thousands of the poorer classes for it to be disposed of with a time-worn dictum. Incontrovertible facts are necessary.
What are the facts that the Government has produced? To strengthen his assertion that the rider-main system was wasteful, the Hon. Colonial Secretary informed us that a comparison had been made by the Government of the water consumption on the Island and in Kowloon, which revealed the fact that the former was consistently some 30% higher per head; and he went on to say that "this comparison made it impossible to avoid the further conclusion that the rider-main system could not be absolved from the charge of wastefulness."
We say that that conclusion is founded on wrong premises. It has been pointed out to us that in making the comparison, the Government did not take into account the considerable quantity of water supplied by Hong Kong to the large number of Kowloon residents who come over here daily during business hours to pursue their vocations, as well as to the even larger number of visitors from the New Territories and Cheung Chau, from Canton and Macao and from other adjacent ports.
However, we do not entirely rely upon this fact, important though it is, to show the unfairness of the comparison. The Government itself has only a few days ago, and unintentionally,
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