Sessional_Paper_1901 — Page 530

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sent out from England to report on the sanitary condition of Hongkong, has been received in the form of a Blue Book, and fully confirms all I have said in my reports from 1874 till now, and proves that if I have appeared to act the part of an alarmist it has not been without good and sufficient grounds. It can only be with regret that any Colonist can look back on the past nine years that have been wasted, and the many great and valuable opportunities afforded for improved sanitation that in the last five years have not only heen thrown away, but absolutely availed of to increase the number and size of the unwholesome dwellings so graphically described in Mr. Chadwick's report.

79. In the report he begins by a general description of Hongkong, in which he states that, "like the Europeans, few of the Chinese are permanent settlers, but only residents coming to Hongkong to avail themselves of the "facilities offered by British rule for earning money with which they propose to return to their own country to end their days amongst their own people." Seeing the benefit that it is acknowledged they receive from British rule, is it too much to expect that they should be required to couform to British laws, instead of the British laws, against the interest of the British people, being made to conform to Chinese ideas? They do not come here with philanthropic ideas of benefitting the Colony any more than the Europeans, but with the same desire of realising a competence and clearing out as soon as possible. One would think, to hear the sympathy that has been wasted on the native population, that we had come here as conquerors of a populous place, instead of having converted a barren island into a prosperous Colony, in which every resident of every nationality is more or less a bird of passage, from the wealthiest merchant whether European or Chinese to the poorest coolie. It ought not therefore to be permissible for one section or the other of the community to convert the Colony into a pest-house for the purpose of realising possession of the Almighty Dollar more speedily than legitimately.”

81. Now what has been argued of late years is that the unwholesome style of building in Hongkong is peculiar to the Chinese, and therefore, though bad enough as one storied buildings, they have been permitted to make them three and four storied, and even then to subdivide each storey by cock lofts. For whose sake? Not for the sakes of the Chinese population, but for the sake of the prosperity of the Colony, when it is a well known fact that crowds were procured by the speculators to fill these houses free of rent, in order that they might represent them to purchasers as being tenanted, and to this as much as anything we owe such an increase of the population living from hand to mouth as has appeared in the last few years, and the consequent overcrowding. In 1874, the houses that were more than two stories high could be easily counted. Now it would be much easier to reckon up those that are not more than two stories high.

82. These, among the numerous other defects in these buildings are what for years the Surveyor General and myself have been protesting against, and which in defiance of our protests Chinese petitioners have received sanction from Government to perpetuate.

85. That this class of cases which may arise from filth poison should be steadily increasing year after year is proof enough that there is something radically wrong somewhere, and Mr. Chadwick's and my own reports of the state of the Chinese houses in this city give sufficient evidence that there is every reason to believe much of it is caused by the foul and unwholesome state of these dwellings.

88. Table XVII shews the work done by the Inspectors of Nuisances. Now that a cleanliness amendment Ordinance has been passed, and a board appointed with a fair staff of officers to look after the sanitation of the Colony, it is to be hoped that in future years we may have to record an improved state of things. It has been a hard fight for the Surveyor General and myself for many years to prove that the state of things so well described in Mr. Chadwick's report existed at all except in our imaginatious, and it was not until he was sent out as Sanitary Commissioner and sent in his report that we were thought anything but alarmists, exaggerating greatly what we have described

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