Sessional_Paper_1887-1888 — Page 377

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(Pier Owners to Colonial Secretary.)

HONGKONG, 5th July, 1888.

SIR.

We have the honour to request that you will bring the following circumstances to the notice of His Excellency the Governor.

1. On perusing the recent despatch addressed to the Honourable C. P. CHATER on the subject of the proposed. Praya Reclamation Scheme, we fail to notice any reference to the privately owned wharves which now occupy positions along the foreshore, and which, in the progress of events must necessarily be destroyed, should the Scheme be carried out.

2. From the very inception of the idea up to the present time, it has been understood that compensation in full would be given to the owners of such wharves before demolition, and the expense included in the general cost of the works: moreover, it was believed that wharf-owners would be granted permission to erect piers attached to the new sea-wall, (in positions corresponding to those they now occupy) adapted for the carrying on of their business, provided that such structures should be deemed suitable to the new state of things by the Surveyor General. We venture to think that the justice of such a course will, after due consideration, be admitted by the Government.

3. It is true that whenever permission to erect a wharf has been granted, the applicant for such permission has been required to sign a guarantee that he will remove the said wharf at his own expense, if called upon to do so by the Govern- ment and we fully admit the general propriety of this practice, which places wharves in their correct position as encroachments on Crown property; at the same time we would respectfully submit that the spirit which dictated such restrictions never presupposed a condition of affairs such as the present. We can well imagine the Government informing a wharf-owner that the public convenience demanded the erection of a public wharf on his site, or that his frontage must be filled in, and the land used for the erection of public works or buildings, and in such a case exception could not well be taken, even though the individual loss might be heavy.

4. The present circumstances however are widely different from the above, inasmuch as the Reclamation Scheme stands upon a basis of "profit;" it is reason- able to suppose that if the value of land reclaimed did not greatly exceed the cost of reclamation, the undertaking would never have received serious consideration.

5. The profit estimated to accrue on the whole, amounts we observe, to the gigantic sum of $5,764,593.00, and without further argument, we would venture to suggest that it is an injustice, and an act akin to confiscation, to utterly destroy the existing property of one section of the community for the sole purpose of increasing the, in

any case, enormous gains of another.

6. The proposed system of conducting the reclamation, appears to us to put the Scheme on an entirely different footing to what would obtain if the Govern- ment accomplished the work themselves. For the work, as proposed, becomes more of a private than a public character, seeing that individuals reap the major pecuniary benefit, and not the Government. On these grounds it may, with force, be urged that the destruction of our wharves is not a public necessity and therefore hardly comes within the pale of the guarantees given on their erection.

7. We are aware that, in strict accordance with the law, the Government have the power to insist on the fulfilment to the letter of the guarantees, but, under the circumstances, the equity of the case should surely be considered, and we venture to hope that the matter when represented to His Excellency the Governor, will induce him to carefully weigh the point we have raised which being compara- tively of inferior importance, may have only received passing notice.