38.
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staff; rather than draft a letter (as I do all my own drafting on my typewriter anyway) send it out to be typed, using government stationery
which I did not have in sufficient quantity I preferred in cases of
fugitive letters to reply in sequence on the original which comes to
me.
No disrespect was intended in that practice: it is simply, as I
said, time and paper saving. It applies without distinction to all
however friendly I might be with them. In the second place I have had
the most elaborate schemes used to get possession of our forms and I
had good reason to believe that some of our forms were getting into
the hands of unrecognized agencies somehow and I was using every endeavour
to prevent them from obtaining supplies of our forms. It was for that
reason that I made it a practice either myself or through one of my
subordinates to check up and see if the staff for whom permits were
asked did in fact exist. It was a surprise to me therefore that I
discovered that the names of these officers were nowhere given in the
local directories; and my suspicions were heightened even in the case
of the Bank of China, I don't think that all the employees of the
Bank of China who had access to the Bank's paper would be above sus-
picion. I did not know the name of Mr. Sung or that he was an eminent
business man, and I was not aware that the head office of the Bank of
China was in Hong Kong.
With regard to returning unopened an official communication, I had
on many occasions given such notice as T could that applicants were
expected to attend in person, or at any rate to be represented in the
office by members of their families. That was necessary in order that
statements in the applications could be checked by questioning. I have
referred in my main memorandum to the fact that I was dissatisfied and
still an dissatisfied with the looseness of control. We are still, I
hold, giving permits far too much as a matter of course. All the in-
formation I have been able to gather regarding immigration control in
other places bears this out. A person is compelled in every case to
appear in person. I hold to that practice as far as I reasonably can.
Chairman: Do you regard the treatment which you extended in this case to
the Bank of China as the courteous treatment that every member of the
public has a right to expect from every branch of the government?
A.
Up to the point when I returned that letter with my footnote, yes. From
that point onwards I should answer the question by saying that I did not
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