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the manning of small craft for patrolling the waters of the Colony, the provision of static guards and patrols for the protection of vital points and areas, the operation of fighter control radar equipment and of some light aircraft, the manning of one infantry battalion, one heavy anti-aircraft battery, and the other administrative combatant and ancillary units of the H.K.D.F., the replacement of unreliable local employees of the fighting services, and the operation of the public utilities and other essential services including food distribution.

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4. The above list, formidable as it is, takes no account of civil defence measures which are now under consideration, nor of the multiplicity of controls, such as censorship and all the paraphernalia of modern economic warfare, which would be required if war were to become imminent.

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5. I accordingly directed in February this year that these plans should be examined and should be related to the reliable local manpower likely to be available in an emergency; result the memorandum which is attached as enclosure No. 1* to this despatch was submitted to and accepted by the Local Defence Committee on 4th April, 1949. The main effect of this decision of L.D.C. (a decision with which I concur) is that the civil and civilian effort of this territory shall be concentrated against the internal threat and that only when preparations to this end are considered wholly satisfactory shall civilian man-power be allotted on a significant scale for other purposes.

6. I should here offer some explanation why this prosperous community of nearly two million souls should be less able than others to organise itself, when the need arises, for war or other emergency. The answer lies partly in the political and partly in the economic sphere. In the political field we must face the fact that in the kind of emergency likely to arise here we should be fortunate for reasons which I believe are already well understood and accepted in most quarters if more than 10,000 persons including the Police Force and the permanent Government Service, prove willing to commit themselves by giving the Government their active and wholehearted support. Ten thousand persons in a population of two million is unlikely to be more than enough to guarantee the preservation of internal order and the operation of the minimum essential services upon which all else depends.

7. In the economic field, quite apart from the grave political factors set out in the preceding paragraph, we are faced with a serious dilemma which renders it difficult to make the best use even of the very limited reliable man-power in the Colony. As I see it, in the circumstances of this territory we can have in peace a thriving commercial entrepot most vulnerable to attack both from within and from without: or we can have in peace an unthriving regulation-bound entrepot prepared to give a reasonable account of itself in war or other

The emergency. But we cannot, broadly speaking, have both. very process of preparing Hong Kong to act as a fortress in war drains away its life blood in peace. Immigration control, registration of the population, compulsory military service and many of the elementary security measures which are in force in most states today would, to all intents and purposes, kill our trade, in order to make the defence of its corpse more effective. A memorandum setting out this argument in detail forms enclosure 2 to this despatch (six copies attached). *

not attached