CAB11-57-2 — Page 41

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25. Thus much as to receipt. As to disbursement, I would note that the surplus in past years has not been used, principally owing to the inadequacy of the Surveyor-General's Department for undertaking the necessary public works. The money therefore has remained in hand (or I should say at interest), but it has not the less been forestalled and unavailable, and is still so.

26. And here I may call attention to the memorandum above enclosed of public works proposed and certainly required, and especially to the mint and to the two gaols in Victoria and on Stone Cutters' Island. Of the mint, I would only say that the benefit to be derived from it, so far as I can see (though I admit I write without a perfect knowledge of the subject), will be entirely or mainly Imperial; while as to the gaols, I would point out that their inmates are not, properly speaking, people belonging to the colony, but chiefly pirates and Chinese belonging to the mainland; and that while their punishment is a sequence of our accidental position, and in aid of those general public interests for the conservation and furtherence of which I assume the colony to have been originally founded, the heavy expense of the custody and maintenance of these criminals falls altogether upon the revenues of Hong Kong.

27. I confess that, in making these remarks, I cannot refrain from reflec- tion on the case of the two neighbouring colonies, Manila and Macao ;

the one a Spanish colony of great fertility and power of production, the other a Portu- guese settlement, producing nothing. Both have been hundreds of years in the hands of their present holders, and each is called on for a contribution to the Treasuries of Spain and Portugal respectively. In Macao the trade, once considerable, is reduced to nothing, and the place is only the shadow of its former self. Of Manila it is notorious that the most is not made, and her principal city is as deficient in the ordinary requirements of civilization as if it had been kept two centuries back. On the recent occasion of a disastrous earthquake, a sum of an amount variously reported, but large, was contributed by the Madrid Government in relief of a colony which, under a different system, would have been perfectly independent of such external aid.

28. I do not, of course, attribute the condition of these two places solely to the contributions exacted by the mother countries; but I am not, I think, straining a point in my argument if I maintain that the moneys they remitted to Europe would have been beneficially expended on the spot, and would, directly on the colony and indirectly on the mother country, have reflected more credit than at the present time can be claimed by either.

29. I am aware that there is another colony in this part of the world similarly circumstanced and apparently contradictory of my view, but the financially prosperous possession of Java is excluded from our present consi- deration by the forced labour system of the Dutch Government, which would not be recognized under a British Constitution.

30. I have instanced the only colonies in these regions actually bearing on the point, the one productive, the other (like Hong Kong) non-productive; but, in any case, it seems to me that the mother country would have been amply repaid with the profits and advantages, immediate and collateral, result- ing from her trade with the colony and with the countries adjacent, for the promotion of which I assume the original settlement to have been made.

31. I admit that it is the duty of all colonies to relieve the Mother Country as far as they can, and that this duty is imperative on all producing colonies; but in the case of a non-producing colony like Hong Kong, it should be borne in mind that it did not plant itself, and that the Mother Country had, it must be assumed, a self-interest in planting it, the attainment and preserva- tion of which interest should be a sufficient return without a direct pecuniary impost, which can only be levied at the cost of the development of the colony.

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