CO129-332 - Public Offices & Others - 1905 — Page 464

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though I suspected that the Corporation would have to follow its own bad precedent in the Shanghai-Fanking case and abandon their Profit Certificates to the bondholders.

As for the public, I said that none of us were really in a position to forecast what the respec-

for

tive proportions of the local traffic would be: part I anticipated a considerable suburban traffic for Kowloon: and any high class prospectus-writer would quite honestly dress up as attractive a prospectus on either side and Macrae had to admit that this was so.

I insisted once more that Macrae was not

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giving us proper credit for what we were bringing into the pool the co-operation of the Colonie and Imperial Goverments

and that these would be of ore weight with the investor than the question of how local re- ceipts were to be divided.

But apart from this I said my main difficulty was that this new proposal upset the balance of my scheme as a whole. The case of 2 associated lines in England was not analogous, for there each was master

in his own house. Here the Colonial Government could be outvoted by the Chinese plus the Corporation, and it might be to the interest of the latter to foster the

local traffic on the Chinese section at the expense of

ours. To protect ourselves we should have to con-

stitute a fresh board for the control of our local

section and to alter the arrangement for a common

ownership of the rolling stock. Thus the simplicity

of my plan would be gone; the more one looked into

it, the more changes seemed inevitable if the Corpora-

tion's

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