6. That the same privileges and immunities have been extended by your Majesty to the German Mail steamers out of friendship and comity, but are dependent upon the existence and continuance of the said Postal Convention and of the supposed rights and privileges of the Trench mail steamers thereunder, as appears from a despatch of your Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs dated 24th April, 1886, to which Your Petitioners crave leave later on to refer.
7. Your Petitioners beg most humbly and yet most forcibly to represent to Your Most Gracious Majesty that the said Postul Convention of September 1856 does not bind Your Majesty's Government in any way to confer upon the steamers of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, although subsidized by the French Govern- meat for the carriage of mails, any such rights, privileges and immunities as have been claimed for them under the said Convention and as have been conferred upon them in this Colony.
5. That Article I of the said Convention provides solely for the establishment of special lines of steamers between the two ports of Calais and Dover and for the ex- change of mail mutter between the Post Office of Great Britain and the Post Office
of France by means of such steamers.
10. That Article II of the said Convention provides for the transmission of mail matter between other British and French Ports either in packets specially maintained or subsidized by either Government for the purpose, or, by merchant vessels plying between the British and the French Ports.
10. That Article III of the said Convention shews clearly that the provisions of Article II are strictly limited to the ports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on the one side and to the Ports of France and Algeria on the other, and do not extend and were not intended to extend to ports or places out of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland or to any place in Your Majesty's Indian or Colonial Dominions.
11. That Article V of the said Convention of 1856, under which alone the rights, privileges and immunities of the French Mail steaners are claimed, is strictly limited by the express words of that article to “parkets employed by the British Post Office or by the French Post Office in execution of Articles I and II of the Convention," that is to say to packets and national vessels the property of Government “or vessels chartered or subsidized by Government" running between Dover and Calais or between ports in France or Algeria on the one side and the ports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on the other, and does not include merchant vessels plying between those ports, although carrying mails, nor to packets, whether national vessels or vessels chartered or subsidized, running to other ports or places out of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
12. Your Petitioners most respectfully call Your Majesty's attention to Article VI of the said Convention and point out to Your Majesty that the packets to be pri- vileged under Article V were not intended to carry cargo but only mails, and that it was as a special privilege conferred by that article that they were permitted to take
and carry spec gold and silver bullion and passengers with their wearing apparel and luggage, and then only upon certain conditions.
13. The steamers of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, upon which
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under peremptory instructions from Your Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Legislative Council of Hongkong have by the votes of the official members, conferred the rights, immunities and privileges of men of war, under the assumed authority of that Convention, are merchant steamers the property of a private company and not of the French Government; they are not 'packets' in the sense of the Convention; they are trading, not between ports in France or Algeria and porte in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but between a French Port and Shanghai in the empire of China and Yokohama in the empire of Japan as their terminal ports. They only call in at Hongkong on their way to and from the above terminal ports. They carry large quantities of merchandise on every voyage, competing successfully with the vessels of Your Majesty's subjects. They are not within Articles I and II of the Postal Convention of 1856, and they are, therefore, not within the scope of Article V, which is strictly limited in its application to “packets employed by the British Post Office or by the French Post Office in execution of Articles I and II of that Convention,”
14. As regards the steamers of the Norddeutscher Lloyd's Company on which similar rights and immunities have been by ordinance coulèrred, your Peti- tioners are aware that these privileges have not been claimed nor conceded under any convention but as a matter of friendship and good will, at the request of the Imperial Government of Germany, but your Petitioners most respectfully submit to Your Ma- jesty that the rights given by the ordinances of which they now complain are far in excess of those asked for by the Imperial German Government in the memorandum, dated Berlin 24th February 1886, submitted to Your Majesty's Minister of Foreign Affairs, and far in excess of those promised in the Foreign Office Despatch addressed to the German Ambassador, in reply, dated 26th April 1884,
15. The Imperial German Government asked simply for immunity from process for German Criminals on board German mail steamers in our ports, and Your Ma- jesty's Government promised to give every possible privilege, provided that instructions should be given to German Consular Officers, Commanders and agents to give “all necessary fucilities to the local authorities in relation to customs regulations aud judi- cial process and not to claim or exercise the privilege in question to the detriment of public justice."
16. This implied that judicial process might still issue, but the ordinance that has been passed here in Hongkong. by conferring on German mail steamers all the rights, privileges and immunities of men-of-war, puts them entirely and at once out- side and beyond the jurisdiction of our Courts, and prevents the Courts from even entertaining any application for process to issue under any circumstances.
17. French mail steamers enjoy in like manner a complete immunity from legal process, and in cases in which American, Austrian, Italian or English mail steamers would necessarily and properly be subject to arrest, detention or search, the German and French mail steamers are needlessly exempted from the delay, the expense and the annoyance. An English steamer may have been run down in the very harbour; an absconding debtor have intentionally taken refuge on board a vessel of the Mer- sageries Maritimes; a heavy loss be entailed on the Colony by a breath of its excise laws, as in the opium case in 1879, and Your Majesty's subjects are in such cases
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