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Extract from the Hong Kong Telegraph, dated 26th August 1908.
SIR HENRY BLAKE AND THE PREVENTION OF PLAGUE.
We noted briefly last evening, as we went to press, the proceedings of the meeting at the Council Chamber when H. E. the Governor met the members of the Sanitary Board for the purpose of submitting a statement as to the results of the recent administration of the experimental blocks of houses in Second and
Third Streets.
We reprint in the present issue the full report of the proceedings as given by our moraing contemporary to-day,
Addressing the meeting, His Excellency raid he bad deferred it until he had first pre- pared a memorandum which those present bad received giving an account of the experiment that, with the permission of the Sanitary Board, he entered upon. That experiment, he assured them, had not been undertaken from mere curiosity, but from an anxious desire to investi- gate into this scourge of plague, whose annual recurrence carried away so many valuable lives and inflicted such injury upon the business of the Colony, He ventured to enter upon that experiment because he felt that as a layman he might dare to attempt that from which protes. sional men would probably shrink. For over ten years now plague had swept over the Colony annually, like a typhoon, sweeping away thousands in its rath, and before its ravages sanitary precautions and medical science had alike been ineffectual. As regard- ed the memorandum, His Excellency proceed- ed, he night therein have said something that perhaps some of those present thought would have been better left unsaid, but he was of opinion in framing it that it would be better both for the public and for them that nothing should be omitted which might render more complete or effective any arrangements made for carrying on the business of fighting this epidemic in the future. To begin with, he was quite satisfied that no sanitary arrangements which could be made would ever be efficiently or economically carried out until the co-opera- tion of the people had been secured. Here, as elsewhere, it had been the babit to say that this co-operation of the people was not pos- sible that it could not be attained. The speaker had been intimately associated with the government of all sorts and conditions of men, from his own mercurial countrymen to the Esquimeaus of the Far North of Labrador, the negro of the West Indies, and now the re- presentatives here of the Chinese race whose civilisation had existed for thousands of years longer than ours; and he found that if the people were only approached in a proper spirit they could be induced to follow the course marked out for them. Human nature was very much the same, in the East as in the West. As Shylock said-"If you prick me, will I not bleed; if you tickle me, will not laugh; if you poison me. will not die; if you wrong me, will not avenge?' In fabrador, the nomad Esquimcau bad been taken possession of by sympathetic action ; the Moravian Mission
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established re had by its exertions trans- formed these moman Esq peau who pos- sessed among themselves no elements of higher feeling, into a respectable, law-abiding, trading community. Whilst in the West Indies, con- tinued His Excellency, he remembered that a great scare of cholera occurred in the Babamas, There all the water was procured from surface well, which were very dity. The general idea was that the position was desperate, because the islands were in! abited by a primitive popu- lation of negroes
His Excellency got those people together, and asked them to do some- thing for themselves. He explained to them where the danger was and told them what to do -to get their wells cleaned and keep them clean. Arrangements to that end were carried out ; the wells were cleaned and made perfectly safe. In Jamaica, as in most places, the negroes were very improvident; their farming was conducted on very primitive lines, and they had no idea of progress. Here again they were got together, an agricultural society, with small branches, was established, leading local men gave their assistance, and trained men were secured to teach the negroes what they ought to do. Now that agricultural society at Jamaica was the most flourishing institution in the island, the people were improving their methods, and the island was becoming more and more prospe- In Hongkong, His Excellency said, they had been faced with the same conditions; they were face to face with a great difficulty, but they entered upon their task with the de- termination to leave nothing undone that money could accomplish in the effort to try to reduce the ravages that plague was responsible for. That the Colony had not been skimped in the matter of sanitation would be realised when it was stated that in 1997 the expenditure on sanitation was about $96,0-o; in 1898, in round numbers, it was $105,000; and the estimated expenditure for next year was $181,000. No- body, therefore, could say that money had been spared or denied on sanitation in Hong- kong, but so far as concerned this particular disease-plague-we were just where we were in 1897. The people, however, were now more inclined to extend their help, but there still existed a doubt, a suspicion, a distrust of authority that was not confined to the Chinese alone, but was really found in certain classes
1t in all countries. was His Excellency's experience in other countries that if
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the people were approached in the proper spirit and trusted a little way they would respond, and if the gentlemen present read the memorandum placed before them they would find that in that small area in the West- ern district handed over to His Excellency, an area picked out as being amongst the worst in the Colony, and inhabited by a very poor class of Chinese, the people did respond, and re- sponded most satisfactorily. He had no hesita tion in saying, went on His Excellency, that the co-operation and activity of the kaifong were worthy of any people of their class in any country. It behoved them, it behoved the members of the Sanitary Board as the people in whose hands the carrying out of sanitary !
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