CO129-194 - Governor Hennessy Administrator Tonnochy - 1881 [8-9] — Page 187

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affording this information to the Public Press; and this is the special reason you give for desiring to appeal to a higher authority.

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2. The Governor desires me to remind you that the proper course for you to adopt in endeavouring to deal with an Officer of the Government, who, you imagine, has abused his official position by affording information to the Public Press injurious to your character as a Government officer, is to lay the facts before the Executive, by whom they would be investigated.

3. I am to inform you that copies of the various official papers relating to remigration which had been printed for the Legislative Council and for transmission to Australia, were, at the request of the editor of the "Hongkong Telegraph", supplied to him by the Governor's authority, and there was nothing in these printed papers to which you or any other officer could object. You have seen that these printed papers gave extracts only from certain reports, and that they entirely omitted the Government Order of the 26th April which contained the official admonition that your examination of Chinese emigrants was not as searching as it should be. To take the action you refer to, would be, in effect, to try in a suit of law the justice or otherwise of an official admonition, a course that would be detrimental to the public service in which a different form of appeal is provided for a Government Officer who may be aggrieved.