policy must be overwhelmingly directed to fostering the interest and catering for the needs of the mainland students. This will be inescapablc and it will also be right. It should make the institution much more attractive to such students and to the National and Provincial Governments whose sympathy will be essential to success. The disparity in cost of living will remain it is true. This will be a source of expense to the remodelled University, but generosity is all that will be needed to overcome this particular difficulty; generosity and a system of halls of residence, the nucleus of which already exists.
The field is therefore prepared and in the Committee's opinion, the time is ripe, for radical change; change that wall place Hongkong University on the pedestal upon which its founders intended that it should stand and make it sorve the purpose for which it was intended. Such a University the Hongkong Government and people cannot be expected to finance. They should contributo, as they did and to the oxtent they did, before the war, for the reconstituted University will serve what neod for higher education they have, much better than before. But the main issue is one
the Foreign Offico and Colonial Office must decide and th main cost will be for the British people and Government t: meet. This is the essential issue for decision and we have therefore, set it first in our Report and have endeavoured to marshal the arguments for and against. We go on to seu out the minimum that in our opinion any British University so situatod should possess, and we have endeavoured very rou hly no more is possible at this juncture to assess the cost. As part of our Terms of Reference we have boon asked to report upon the University's immediate needs. This we have done though we have subordinated this part of our task to what we consider to be the overriding problem and the over- riding neod. What we propose in this respect can be carried out without prejudice to the major decisions upon the ultimate fate of the University, but it would not be possible to ge much farther until the question we have put has been answered in one way or another. It is this. Is Britain's stake in the Far East worth a million pounds or a million and half in capital expenditure and a subsidy of about a hundred thousand pounds a year, in order to establish a University of first rank capable of competing on equal terms with its Chinese sisters and of making a unique contribution at the critical point to the difficult problems that must needs arise where two such dissimilar civilisations meet?
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