APPENDIX.
Being an Official Letter from the Hon. Francis Bulkeley Johnson, of the firm of Jardine, Matheson, & Co., Chairman of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, to Charles Magniac, Esq., M.P., President of the London Chamber of Commerce.
Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce,
Hong Kong, 22nd November, 1882.
Sir,—The attention of the Committee of this Chamber has been called to certain statements recently made in the United Kingdom regarding this Colony, on what must unfortunately appear to the public mind to be competent authority, but which are nevertheless unwarranted and misleading.
The statements referred to are, in the opinion of the Committee, calculated not only to affect injuriously the reputation of the Colony, but to damage its interests by prejudicing the policy of the Home Government and the Imperial Parliament, when dealing with the settlement of questions arising out of the close political and commercial relations which the Island of Hong Kong from its juxta-position must necessarily hold with the Empire of China.
The Committee offers no apology for addressing you on this subject as it ventures to believe that the promotion of British Commercial enterprise abroad in all legitimate channels is one of the objects the London Chamber of Commerce has in view, and, to that end, it is clearly desirable that a true appreciation should prevail, not only among the members of your influential Committee, but throughout the United Kingdom, as to the position and character of British trade and traders in the Colonies and foreign countries.
In the course of an address on the Repression of Crime delivered at the Social Science Congress, recently held in Nottingham, Sir John Pope Hennessy, Governor of this Colony, now on leave of absence in England, is reported to have said—I quote from the Nottingham and Midland Counties Daily Express, of the 22nd September:—“In the little Colony under my government one million sterling changes hands every month in the article of opium. But, with commercial activity and profits, there comes an increase of crime from opium, from its consumption, and from its smuggling. Hong Kong wages a chronic opium war on a small scale with China. A desperate class of men, the opium smugglers make the Colony the base of their operations—they purchase cannon and ammunition there, they fit out heavily armed junks and engage, within sight of the island, in naval battles with the revenue cruisers of the Emperor of China. Sometimes the Emperor’s revenue officers are killed, sometimes the smugglers. Not unfrequently wounded men of both sides are brought into the Colony. All this gives rise to a class of crimes difficult for the Governor to repress, difficult on account of the influence of those who profit by it, whether they are local traders or the financiers of a Viceroy.”
The picture thus sensationally drawn is one which, from its great exaggerations, gives an untrue representation of the state of things prevailing in these waters, and cannot fail to lead to the formation of wholly incorrect inferences as to the relations existing between the population of this island, for the most part law-abiding and pursuing honest and industrious callings, and the authorities of the neighbouring mainland.
Sir John Hennessy states that opium, to the extent of a million sterling, changes hands in this Colony every month, and this assertion as to the magnitude of the trade was obviously made in order to show the vast and wide-spread interests involved in it, and the influential protection therefore likely to be afforded to a traffic which the general tenour of the remarks just quoted cannot fail to lead ordinary readers to suppose is to a very large extent, if not mainly, contraband.
Your Committee will be able to judge from the following facts how far the injurious imputation, thus plausibly insinuated, if not directly stated, is to be justified by the actual position of affairs.