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to be the case. It is my opinion that the new assessment of the Colony, if efficiently carried, out will produce a bigger increase than has been allowed for. "Land sales is admittedly a difficult item to estimate, but with trade resumed I believe there will be fresh application for land coming in almost immediately. This Colony has been foully struck below the belt, but we have not been "knocked out or even nearly so, and, therefore, it would seem there is no reason to display ourselves in garments too small for us.
""
EDUCATION IN THE COLONY.
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Sir, I should like to make a few remarks
on the subject of education in this Council. Perhaps in the recent Bolshevik cam- paign, which has been engineered from Canton, and perhaps it would be more accurate to say from Moscow, nothing has more annoyed old residents, who have a real affection for this Colony and a firm belief in British fairplay, than the lying campaign of calumny which has misrepresented the British officials and the British business men of this Colony as riding rough shod over the rights of the Chinese and brutally, or imperialistically, for that is the favou- rite word used-riding roughshod also over the rights of the Chinese here. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. On the contrary the record of this Colony is one of sympathetic Government by three generations of hardworking officials of the highest integrity, and of friendly intercourse of three generations of British business firms with the Chinese in this Colony.
SANCTUARY FOR CHINESE.
The wonderful prosperity which this Colony has attained and the manner in which Chinese have flocked here to do business, is a sufficient refutation of the gross slanders to which I have referred. Some years ago a former Land Officer of this Colony estimated that the Chinese owned fifteen-sixteenths of the landed property in this Colony, and it is a well known fact that their large land-owning still continues and also that they are the owners of a large proportion of the shares in our public companies. We have also the curious fact that the wives and families of
of the officials in Canton, who are now working against us, are actually receiving sanc- tuary here in our midst in this so-called imperialistic British Colony.
some
STRIKING COMPARISONS.
I have in my hand a despatch of a former Governor, Sir William Des Vœux, dated October 31st, 1889, reporting to the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the condition and prospects of Hongkong, and in that despatch he points out with pride that our revenue for 1888-one and a half million dollars- In was larger than in any former year. 1924 our revenue was about 24 million dollars. Another item which Governor Des Vœux mentions is land sale receipts which amounted to $160,000 as against nearly three million dollars received in 1923, a bumper year. The population for 1888 he mentions as 160,000. Before the commencement of the recent unrest it was probably about 800,000.
A WONDERFUL TRANSFORMATION.
In the concluding paragraph of his despatch, Sir William Des Voeux pointed. out the wonderful transformation since we took over in 1840 of Hongkong from a bare rock, with a fisherman's hut
"
here and there" to a wonderful and busy and prosperous shipping port.
In
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