Ir is well that the Hongkong Cham. ber of Commerce has taken up with more zeal than before, the question of the blockade of Hongkong harbour by the Chinese Government cruisers. The position of Great Britain in this matter is, to say the least of it, undignified, It almost provokes a smile to sean number of little gunboats prowling round the entrance toa British har. hour, and seizing what prey they can, while British men-of-war and British troops are stopping idly within, and not taking a step to put an end toa system of exaction which is seri. ously hurting the trade of the colony, The Chinese residents are coming to look upon British protection as a thing of the past; and are losing confidence in the future of the colony, now that it lets itself be over-ridden in matiers 80 nearly affecting its own interest, by the Government of Kwantung; and, as natural consequence, trade of every desert is falling off, and the colony is gradually losing its position as a commercial centre, That we are not exaggerating the position of affairs, we have Captain Thomsett's report for 1874 to prove, A falling off in arrivals and departures of 10,000 vessels and of 654,000 tons cannot be accounted for by the natural fluctua. tion of trade, It is no salve to the wounded interests of the place, that this falling off was mainly in native craft; for the native trady of Hongkong is really the back-bone of the colony—in itself but a bare rock. Nor \indeed do the statistics look much more wholesome for the foreign ship. ping. The decrease in the tonnage of, the Intter is over one-third; and when we remember that a large proportion of foreign vessels entering Hongkong, merely dose en route to the northern ports, we shall see that this reduction of tonnage entered really meang far more loss to the local trade than one-third. The hindrance to the trade in native craft should, were trade able to be carried on at all, have resulted in an increased traffic in foreign bottoms with the Treaty ports. That this las not taken place, but the reverse, shows that the sources of trade are interfered with, and not only the channels by which it is carried on.
Hongkong has the same tale to tell 8 all the rest of China—the forcible repression, by exactions so heavy as to be prohibitory, of trafic of whatever nature. In the rest of China, we have allowed rights'gained by treaty to be given up without even a word of protest. In Hongkong we hare gore farther. Not content with being smitten on one cheek, we have held out the other, and have permitted our own waters and our own trade to be obstructed by all sorts of irregular cruisers. During his tenure of office Sir Richard MacDonnell incurred the suspicion of having more or less submitted to this infraction of the rights of the Colony. But it is satisfactory
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.