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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
PAPERS RELATING TO
youths. At present it is very useful in providing a good school for the children of the upper and middle classes of European Protestants.
139. The German Foundling Hospital and the Italian and French Convents are benevolent institutions deserving of the highest praise. But the religious life of Hong Kong is essentially missionary.
140. In fact, Hong Kong is one of the most important centres of missionary work in the world. One ecclesiastic here acts as the business agent of 18 missionary bishops in China and Japan. Putting aside the undoubted benefits conferred on local education, on local Christian charities, and on the tone of society by the presence here of those missions, I cannot confirm what has been more than once recorded in the Blue Book Reports that have been printed for the information of Parliament, namely, that this Colony is producing a beneficial effect on the heathen population of the great Empire of China and "leavening the surrounding mass of ignorance and superstition." On the contrary, for many years past, Christianity has been declining in China, and, at this moment, the total number of Christians is considerably less than the number that existed in the last century.
141. Writing from a spot where I have exceptional opportunities of knowing the facts, I must not conceal from Her Majesty's Government that this decline of Christianity is due not to a want of zeal on the part of the Christian missionaries themselves, but rather to the conditions under which they are willing to work.
142. They proceed from this Colony into China supported by treaties, Consuls, and, if needs be, gunboats. The Chinese associate them with a system to which, whether rightly or wrongly, they object very much, the system of foreign intervention. A Chinese statesman who was visiting me said:- "The missionary enterprises that have their headquarters under your Government would be treated by us with the same friendly toleration that we accord to the Taoists and the Buddhists but for their constant appeals to what they call treaty rights; but those treaty rights, though framed by the late Emperor of the French and by the illustrious Lord Palmerston in the interests of true Christianity only, and not for any political object whatever, do not appear to us Chinese to be as serenely elevated above worldly considerations as their religiously-minded authors doubtless intended, and the consequence is that Christianity is making no way, is indeed declining visibly."
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143. There are other causes also in operation in the social and commercial life of Hong Kong that cannot have a very beneficial effect on the heathen population near us. In explaining why he did not send a son to be trained in Hong Kong, one of the Canton merchants of the old Hongs said to me, "Your Western progress which makes children so independent of their parents and substitutes individual and youthful energy for family ties and the influence of grey hairs may suit you, but we do not like it. Your commercial laws by which a trader can get rid of his debts