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Hong Kong is a splendid example of what determined men possessed of the colonizing spirit may accomplish. The founders of Venice did no more in the lagoons of the Adriatic. A man responsible for much of Hong Kong's filling in and excavation is Sir Paul Chator, a British subject of Armenian birth, gifted to an unusual degree with foresight.
England and America are fortunate in being on terms of complete international amity, but none the less has the conquest of the Philippines by the United States profoundly modified the strategical conditions as they existed in the Pacific when the islands belonged to a weak naval power like Spain. Hong Kong's population and traffic double every ten years, and no harbor has a greater tonnage.
Eighty per cent, of Hong Kong's people are Chinese, and to this multitude the human contributions of Europe and America form necessarily a thin relief.
Hong Kong's streets are among the most interesting in the great East, for they strike the key of true cosmopolitanism. Along them 'rickshaws pass in endless procession, electric cars roar, and sedan-chairs swing. The chair borne by four bearers provides the acme of transportation in fine weather.
Were Hong Kong a port of origin, instead of a port of call, its commercial importance would be greater than that of London. A few years ago the British Government induced China to lease a slice of the mainland of goodly dimensions, to accommodate Hong Kong's swelling trade.
All slavery throughout British possessions had been prohibited only a few years before the settlement of Hong Kong, in 1833, when 20,000,000 pounds had been distributed by England as a boon to slave-holders. Hong Kong's first Legislative Council was held in 1844, and its first ordinance was an anti-slavery measure in the form of an attempt to define the law relating to slavery.
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