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not spend the same amount of time and organization as in the villages. The three principal forms of society which appear to me to be desirable in Hong Kong are (a) the thrift and loan society, (b) the housing society and (c) the consumers' stores. The thrift and loan society flourishes in towns of British Malaya. It is suited only to a permanent population, but need not be confined to the richer members. The principle is that every individual member agrees to contribute a weekly or monthly sum out of his earnings to his own savings account in the society: he can then borrow from that same sum whenever he requires money for a purpose approved by the managing committee (if the managing committee does not approve the pur- pose, he cannot obtain a loan even from his own money, he can only resign from the society and take all his money away). Some societies permit the member to borrow a sum in excess of his own savings. I consider this a less prudent policy and if this practice is followed, there should be a higher rate of interest on such loans. All sums borrowed from a thrift society have to be repaid while the member continues in addition to make his regular contributions. Thus at the end of his service he retires (as now in Malaya) with a sum of several thousand dollars to his credit, which he is able to use for buying an annuity or building a house. These societies work best if they are confined to a single service or office or firm, since it is then simple to authorize the accountant to get the regular contribution from the members' pay and hand it over to the treasurer of the society: but there is no reason why they should not also work quite well amongst ricksha pullers or similar groups of labourers who are associated together in some way, either in a common tenement or in a common occupation.

The co-operative housing society must be distinguished from the building society as known in Europe. In Hong Kong at all events it will probably be impossible to build separate houses for clerks or other members of such a society, and co-operative housing must, as in Bombay, take the form of a co-operative tenement owned by the members generally, each of whom pays rent to the whole society and is himself a share-holder in it. It is worth the while of Government to finance such housing society if a group of clerks or other middle class persons or even Europeans should wish to set up a building in which they can live on a friendly footing and without the intrusion of persons of different habits. The Government in such a case either directly or by a guarantee to a bank would grant a loan to the society by instalments, secured by a mortgage on the growing building, and would arrange terms of gradual amortisation when the building was com- pleted. Shares of such a society should be of considerable size in order greatly to amortise the loan, but payment can be made by small instalments in order that the poorer persons may not be excluded. If the Housing Commission recently appointed recommends the formation of an unofficial Housing Association, the latter should give sympathetic support to schemes of co-operative housing. It is scarcely possible to arrange the housing of the very poorest classes on a CO- operaitve basis. They are not permanent residents and their income is insecure. Such persons are nearly always handled in other countries by Government or by philanthropic bodies. Co-operative stores are now found in every part of the world, though they work on two principles, sometimes selling at the market price and repaying the surplus at the end of the year to each member according to the amount of business he or she did with the store, or selling at the lowest possible price and having virtually no surplus to distribute at the end of the year. The latter, which is more common in the Mediterranean countries, helps the poorer classes, but is dangerous because it makes inadequate provision for loss. The former is the safer, but does not help the poorest people. In my opinion safety is to be preferred. Such stores are usually financed by a commercial bank which holds a lien on the goods in the shop or in the bank's own godown.