CO129-491 - Public Offices - 1925 — Page 403

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Hongkong is one of the most beautiful and wonderful places in the world.

The last decade has witnessed an enormous change not only in Hongkong but in Kowloon and the new Territories. All three places have grown and spread out in every possible direction.

Expansion is the cry of the day. One has only to look over the huge docks and shipbuilding yards. The famous Whampoa and Kowloon Docks and the Taikoo Dock

of Butterfield and Swire; to go over the wonderful worke and buildings of those two great British firms in the far East, Jardine Matheson and Co., and Butterfield and

Swire; to see the houses and sanitariums built by these respective firme for all their employees European and Chinese which form practically little towns of themselves, to watch the growth of roads, buildings of all sorts, town planning in Kowloon and the Harbour

Development Scheme by the Public Works Department in order to realize what a very important and valuable Colony Hongkong is to Britain. Yet the average Britisher has no conception of what this wonderful place is like situated as it is at the out-posts of the British Empire.

Does even the Secretary of State for the Colonies

realize it? One somehow wonders, otherwise the ruling

of this Colony would be rather different to that which

now obtaina.

Is it not high time the powers that be in England

pause and consider what such a Colony means to us and to

see that it is ruled wisely and well especially in these

days of unrest when perhaps certain sections of the Chinese ill-advised by another country might try to

wrest