Iris difficult to invent a proposition so absurd that it can find no supporters. Even the idea of giving up Gibraltar was believed, a few yenrs ago, to find favour with-some Hnglish statesmen, And so Sir Arthur Kennedy told us, on the occasion of his departure for Australia, that not only had "a wonderful gentleman at Peking—a British subject he believed still—recommended up Hongkong to China;" but distinguished diplomatist" had been heard to back up the opinion, Were it not for the correspondence in the last Blue Book on the Blockade question, we should have thought it impossible that to a third person such an idea could have seemed other than the bad joke Sir Arthur Kennedy suggested it would appear to people generally; but the tone of Sir Brooke Robertson's despatches leads us to believe that he could be persuaded by: his Chinese friends to acquiesce in a surrender of the Colony rather than the Hoppo should. be deprived of a portion of his revenue. However this may be, it is interesting to learn from the Harbour-Master's report the extent of the trade which has "grown up in five-and-thirty years, under English auspices. Excluding the junk trade, 2,867 vessels, measuring' 2,178,485 tous, entered the port in 1876, being 6.84 per cent: of vessels and 9.86. per cent, of tons more than arrived in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.