681595-1881-Legislative-Council — Page 8

422

THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 11TH JUNE, 1881.

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fortune-tellers in the Colony, instead of 46 in 1876. The schoolmasters have increased from 114 to 171, and students from 341 to 2,562. These students are not to be confounded with school-boys, who are dealt with in another part of the census. Most of these gentlemen who return themselves as students are, no doubt, young men, but some of them possibly are old men, who devote themselves to literary pursuits. Portrait painters have increased from 170 to 200, and photographers from 30 to 45. Story-tellers have

decreased from 5 to 1. Musicians, also, I am If it were sorry

have fallen from 70 to 30. to see, not one of those statistical fallacies that sometimes

occur, even in the best regulated Registrar Gene-

ral's Office, it would be a melancholy fact, that when our Chinese bankers and bullion dealers

come upon the scene, the story-tellers and musi-

cians seem to disappear. Perhaps great material

prosperity is not without some drawbacks.

On the whole, it is manifest we have in this Colony an increased Chinese community of great importance to the commercial interests of England, and, therefore, we may at once answer the question as to this large dealing in land, and may admit it was a just and natural process, and that this transfer of property from Europeans to Chinese

was not of a merely speculative kind.

Now, does Hongkong fulfil the object for which

it was established? That I need hardly ask you,

gentlemen, after the brief resumé I have given But it has sometimes

you of our census returns.

been discussed what the object of this Colony

is, and in my time I have heard it said that it is a military object, or a naval object-I have generally been of opinion myself it was commercial

but I find on referring to a despatch of the

Secretary of State to Sir JOHN DAVIS, where this question was raised, that there it is briefly and clearly laid down for what object this Colony was really established, Sir JOHN DAVIS had to forward to Her Majesty's Government a memorial from the foreign merchants complaining of the taxation of Hongkong. They represented that Hongkong had been established, as they thought,

·for military objects in China, and, on that account, they begged the Imperial Government would undertake to pay for the cost of the establish- ments, and that they themselves should be relieved from taxes. The Secretary of State who had to decide this question was a man of great ability. It was in the year 1846. He was then a young man, but he evidently gave due attention to the subject, and, having reviewed the whole question, he expresses his opinion that the occupation of Hongkong was decided on solely and exclusively with a view to commercial interests; and, in a word, his despatch said it was established in the interests of trade alone, and that the traders naturally should pay the expenses of the Colony. I find that this same Secretary of State had in a previous despatch requested the Governor to have land sales in the town of Victoria at which none but Chinese could bid. Representations came rom the Governor, either Sir HENRY POTTINGER

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