(3)
Today,
The Post
notable characteristics when I first came across it. under Sollis, it is an active, progressive organism. Office and Imports & Exports Department should be left to technically trained men after the war.
The junior cadets are as good a lot of men as I have ever met, but as they get high up in the Service they tend towards
nor are the reasons either crankiness or mental sluggishness
far to seek.
(a) Both as juniors and seniors they are "swapped" about from department to department as the need arises and few of them settle down to one line of business: the principal causes of this are (i) the number of departments for which the administrative officers are found from the Cadet Service and (ii) the dire insistence upon the rights of seniority: thus one change in post-holding may easily lead to three or four.
(b) Hongkong can offer no more than a semi-suburban existence:
there is no opportunity of gaining the mind-widening experience which Provincial Administration in large Colonies provides.
(c) owing to their relatively high salaries and prospects Hongkong Cadets do not often seek or get promotion on transfer. (In fact, I believe that the high pay given at Hongkong works to the disadvantage of the Service as a whole).
If the Cadet Service were to be confined to the following duties Colonial Secretary's Office, Financial Secretary's Office, Office of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, Labour Office (into which I would introduce posts for a Social Welfare Officer and a Development Officer) Urban Council and District Administrations a more compact and homogeneous branch of the Civil Service would come about in time. But even so the enervating effects of this "Multum in parvo" Colony would still be felt injuriously and I think that when peace returns the Secretary of State should insist on a certain amount of interchange for a secondment basis, probably between Hongkong and Malaya. Malaya! argument that they would gain nothing by that interchange seems to me to disregard the wider i.e. the Imperial aspect: moreover, Hongkong is much closer to China than Singapore and I think that the latter would score by some of her officers having the advantage of that more intimate contact.
THE HONGKONG
UNIVERSITY
Now that the British Council and the Rhodes Trustees have given tokens of their recognition of the importance of the University from the Imperial point of view I hope that after the war this unique and admirable instrument of British policy in the Far East will be given adequate recognition and financial help by H.M. Government. It is not possible, and it never will be possible, for the little Colony of Hongkong to provide the University with the funds required to keep it at full academic pitch, i.e. by the difference between its recurrent expenditure and its fee plus investment income. Nor is it incumbent on the Colony to do so. Hongkong today finds in cash some $30,000 annually and assists also in other ways, e.g. free land, services etc. On the other hand it is not the Colony which reaps the greater part of the benefit: that goes to the Empire.
When one thinks of what the U.S.A. are doing by way of subvention to Universities in China and how American prestige
gains
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