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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
the speech without a tribute to the extreme care and laborious research which has been revealed and further to the labour of collecting and of representing so fully the views of all sections of the Chinese community. These views are so minutely set out that a justifiable inference is that there can be little if anything more to be said upon this side of the question.
At the same time the Government is not prepared to let the implications of the statements in support of the rider main system go entirely unchallenged and it would be an error to allow it to appear on record that the Government accepted the interpretations put by Dr. Kotewall on various phases of the history. For instance the whole of the quotations dealing with the possibility of preventing waste through the rider main system turned on the supply of a master meter to each section. Such master meters never were in fact installed and it is very doubtful whether they could have been installed with success. It is only necessary to consider the feelings of the residents in any one section who were all cut off because there had been waste by some one or other of them, the only course that would have been open had waste been proved. Further, again, it is wrong, I submit, to consider the institution of the rider main system as a bargain in the way that the Senior Chinese Unofficial member interprets it. It was a compromise and an experiment, and it was
a bargain in that the Chinese community paid for the original rider main system when the Government was not prepared to pay for the installation, by way of trying out its value, but there was not and could not be a bargain in the sense that the terms were unalterable. A fairer view and I submit the correct view is that the experiment has been tried out and the purchasers have received at least full value for the whole of their expenditure. We must not again forget that the abolition of the rider mains has been necessitated very largely by the pressure of the Chinese themselves for the installation of meters. Since the date in 1923 to which Dr. Kotewall refers the decision te grant meters freely to all applicants has been the primary cause of the existing condition of things, which inevitably leads to a complete abolition of the system as a whole.
I have already in moving the resolution apologised for the action of the Government in overlooking Sir Cecil Clementi's promise to allow an opportunity for a full discussion in Council before the rider main system was abolished. Dr. Kotewall is at pains to impress its offence upon the Government but it can be confidently stated that Sir Cecil Clementi himself would have had no hesitation in agreeing that the abolition of the system as a whole was already necessary provided he was in possession of the information which we have to-day. That information was not available in 1929 and in fact conditions which altered the whole aspect of the case had their origin no earlier than this year. Sir Cecil also stated that it would be impossible to discard the system until there was a full supply of water on the Island and on the Mainland. There again
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