Those conditions which render impossible the existence of a representative government in Hongkong forbid also the introduction of municipal government in Victoria, the capital of the colony; and there is thus no imperium in imperio in the colony: everything-police, watersupply, lighting, sanitation-is administered by the Colonial Government.

It was proposed some years ago to establish a municipality in Hongkong, and it is amusing to find in the Sessional Papers of the colony a letter from a member of the Legislative Council opposing the change on the ground that "the evils that would spring from such a concession would destroy all confidence in the administration of affairs, and introduce the colony to the municipal experiences of New York and San Francisco."

We have seen what the system of government is in Hongkong, and we may now turn to the men who administer it.

The civil service of Hongkong is what is known as a Cadet Service—that is, a service in which all the high administrative appointments are reserved for men who have passed the examinations prescribed for Eastern cadets.

An examination is held each year in London (open to all British subjects, white or colored) for posts in the Home Civil Service, the Indian Civil Service, and the Eastern Cadet Service-that is, the civil services of Ceylon, Hongkong, the Straits Settlements, and the Federated Malay States. There is only one examination, and successful candidates are allowed to choose, in their pass order, the service they wish to enter, until the vacancies are exhausted.

Of the severity of these examinations Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, in his "Colonial Civil Service," says: "The examination papers are such as might be set, in an American university, for graduation honors or for a Ph.D. But it must be remembered that they are prepared by men who have nothing to do with the instruction

The men who, after passing the examination, select the Hongkong service, are at once placed on the pay-roll of the colony at a salary of $1,500 silver (equal to about $750 gold), and are then sent to Canton for two years to study Chinese. During this time they must pass four examinations in Chinese, and failure in these is followed by dismissal from the service. Practically all posts in the public service of the colony, except those in the technical services, are open to cadets, and it is understood that, as a rule, no one but a cadet can rise to the highest posts.

The salaries of the Colonial officials of Hongkong are high as measured by the standard of official salaries in the United States; but they are by no means too high. if the paramount importance of securing the best men for the colonial service is considered. The salaries of the principal officials are as follows, in silver dollars equal to about fifty cents gold each: the Governor, $35,000; the Chief Justice, $13,500; the Colonial Secretary, $10,800; the Attorney-General and the Puisne Judges, $8,400 each; the Director of Public Works, $7,800; the Harbor Master, the First Police Magistrate, and the Captain-Superintendent of Police, $6,000 each.

It is instructive to note that a number of the government officials of Hongkong are men of academic distinction. The Colonial Secretary is a first-honor man and prize-man in classics and modern languages of Trinity College, Dublin; the Assistant Colonial Secretary is a prizeman of Edinburgh University, a first-honor man in English literature, modern history, and constitutional law, and an exhibitioner of Magdalen College, Oxford; and the service includes a Bacon Scholar of Gray's Inn and a Boden Sanscrit Scholar.

As Hongkong is a free port, and as the trade is almost entirely a transit trade, no record is kept of the nature and value of the cargoes which enter and leave the harbor. The only guide, therefore, to the financial condition of the island is the annual return of revenue and expenditure. The public revenue of Hongkong in 1901 was $3,973,578 (equal to about $1,800,000

gold)—that is, $6 gold per head of the population. More than four-fifths of the revenue comes under eight heads: assessed taxes (equivalent to our municipal rates), $708,000; opium monopoly, $687,000; spirit licenses, $126,000; revenue stamps, $442,000; postage stamps, $356,000; rent of government land and buildings, $555,000; profit on the issue of coinage, $184,000; and water revenue, $169,000.

The accounts of the expenditure of the colony show that out of a total expenditure of $4,000,000 only one million dollars went as personal emoluments. Of the remaining $3,000,000 more than threefifths fell under the heads: Public works (roads, bridges, buildings), $700,000; military contribution (a sum paid to England for the defense of the colony and in consideration of the assignment to the colony as residents of nearly five thousand troops), $851,000; niscellaneous services (chiefly incurred through measures of sanitation and the prevention of plague), $469,000; police, $400,000; pensions and retiring allowances, $178,000; and charges on account of the public debt, $162,000.

The task of administering the affairs of Hongkong is a peculiar and difficult one. It must be remembered that very nearly ninety-seven per cent. of the population is Chinese, and that from the extraordinary difficulty of learning the Chinese language the intercourse between the mass of the people and those who are administering their affairs is limited almost entirely to brief official interviews. For tunately, the Chinaman is, under ordinary circumstances, a law-abiding citizen with a wholesome respect for established authority. But the population of Hongkong is not normal in its composition, for it contains an undue proportion of criminals. This is due to its proximity to Canton, and to the extreme mildness of the English criminal law as compared with that of China. As an example of this we may take the punishment which would follow a third or fourth conviction of petty theft in Hongkong and in China respectively. On the mainland an end would be put to the offender's career either by rubbing quicklime into his eyes or by crushing his ankle-bones so as to lame him for life; in Hongkong he would get a few months' hard labor in jail. The

result is that Hongkong has become a happy hunting-ground for hundreds of criminals from the adjoining province of Kwangtung, and that the police force of the colony costs about $400,000 a year, or one-tenth of the total expenditure.

But although the Chinaman is not, generally speaking, given to crime, he pos sesses certain characteristics which, from the standpoint of the colonial administrator, are even more difficult to deal with. Foremost among these is his absolute indifference to sanitary conditions of life. We are familiar with the idea of domestic animals living in some little hovel in the poorest district of Ireland, and the picture is unpleasant even when we remember that during the day such animals will be out-of-doors. A Chinaman, unless he is closely watched, will keep pigs in the fourth story of a house in which perhaps a dozen families live beneath him; and on that fourth story, with its open-work floors, the pig will live and move and have his being until he changes his Saxon name for his French one.

Another thing which makes the Chinaman very difficult to deal with is the complete organization of all classes into guilds and secret societies, backed by the solid influence of the clan and family ties. This social cohesion makes it almost impossible to protect individual interests or those of the colony when these run counter to some habit or tradition of the Chinese. For instance, one of my Chinese servants commits an offense and I dismiss him. One of two things will happen; either I will engage in his place, unwit tingly, another member of his family, a son, brother, uncle, or cousin, or, if by some rare chance I detect the relationship and refuse to engage the new applicant, I find it impossible to get a man in his place, for the union or guild to which the dismissed servant belongs will boycott me. It is the same in matters which affect the community at large. fined by a magistrate for commiting some offense against the sanitary Laws; the fine is paid by the guild, and the ends of justice are defeated.

A man is

The utter disregard of truth which is a marked trait of the Chinese character, the entire absence of any sense of shame when detected in a lie or in a crime, the mutual distrust which pervades all classes,

the disregard of promises, the concentration of the minds of the people on the single idea of economy (which results, to give an instance, in a perfect readiness to eat diseased meat if it is sold a fraction cheaper than good meat), the incapacity of the Chinaman to feel ordinary physical pain (a peculiarity which has been mistaken by some observers for a remarkable fortitude in bearing it), the complete indifference to the misfortunes of others— these things make the administration of a Chinese community difficult in the

extreme.

To give just three instances of occurrences in which some of the above traits appear. Some years ago there was a terrible typhoon in Hongkong. Many hours before its arrival the observatory officials issued a warning to all ships and junks. A police boat was sent to Mirs Bay, where a great many fishing-nets are placed under charge of men who live in small huts perched on the top of a couple of poles right out in deep water. All these men were warned by Chinese policemen of the approaching danger and were advised to leave their huts and go on shore, the launch offering to take them free of charge. Not one of the men followed this advice; the typhoon came, and every one of them was drowned. It was afterwards explained by their friends on shore that the reason why the men had refused to leave their nets was that they could not conceive of the possibility of the government offering to take the men on shore free of charge unless a sinister motive lay behind the act.

During the same typhoon a number of junks were wrecked in Hongkong harbor, and no effort of any kind was made by the Chinese to help one another. Drowning people floated past safely anchored junks, but although numbers could have been saved merely by the casting of a rope, those on the junks sat still and calmly watched their fellow men and women drown. The English were in the meanwhile busy at rescue work. One junk was seen to be sinking, and a number of young men, at the greatest personal peril, made a living cordon over some wreckage and called out to the single Chinaman on board that if he was quick they might save him. As soon as the man had assured himself that the men really in

tended to save him, he disappeared for a moment and returned with a heavy trunk which he said they might pass on shore for him first.

His

There is a great deal of fishing around Hongkong, and one fishing junk set out with a crew of four or five men to catch fish by means of exploding dynamite under the water. One of the men, in getting a cartridge ready, set it off by mistake and blew off both his hands at the wrists. companions sailed over to a small rock near by, set the man ashore, and left him to die or recover, as might be his luck. The man died; the case came under inquiry, and the Chinamen indignantly defended their action on the ground that if he had only blown off one hand they would have kept him on board, but that as he had lost both his hands and could thus be of no use at all, they had done the only thing possible in setting him on shore to die.

The discouraging part of all this is that, as far as one can judge, three hundred and fifty years of contact with the white man has made no appreciable change in the Chinaman.

In talking over the matter with one or two highly educated and widely traveled Chinese gentlemen in Hongkong, I was told that, with the exception of a mere handful of men in Hongkong and the Treaty Ports, contact with Western civilization had absolutely failed to change a single trait in the Chinese character; that we are as much hated and despised as ever we were by the mass of the people; that as far as the present is concerned, the existence of powerful armed forces alone insures the lives of the foreigners; and that, for the future, the probabilities pointed to the total exclusion of the foreigners from China. This they all deplored; but it was their sincere conviction.

The more we bear these facts in mind the greater must be our admiration for England's work in Hongkong. She has turned a nest of pirates into a flourishing city; she has thrown it open to the world; she has made life and property as secure there, where there are scarcely two white men in a hundred, as they are in London; and she has done all this almost within sight of Canton, where to-day, as fifty years ago, when a foreigner passes in the streets the people cry, " Ah, foreign devil! foreign devil!”

O

N November 3 the "Jim Crow," or separate street-car, law went into effect in New Orleans. This law was passed at the last session of the Louisiana Legislature. By its terms the street railway companies are compelled to use separate cars for the carrying of white and colored passengers, or to fit the cars with wire screens or wooden partitions.

When the bill was introduced by Mr. Wilson, of Tangipahoa Parish--a parish, by the way, that hasn't a street-car in itthere followed a perfect hail-storm of editorials and letters to the press, some condemning or approving such a law in toto, others discussing certain phases of or deductions from the law and its operation. One of the most surprising things about the discussion was the fact that popular opinion, so far as both races were concerned, was about equally divided on the matter. So strong, indeed, was the opposition that at one time the bill came near not passing, and had it not been for the fact that in Louisiana the negro is practically without political influence, it is almost certain that it would not have passed. In support of the measure there was, however, a strong following. neither unjust nor inaccurate to say that this following was made up principally of those who dislike the negro because he is the negro. This fact is indicated in the chief argument advanced by those supporting the measure, i.e., that refined women and men were forced to sit by and rub elbows with negroes.

It is

Those who opposed the passage of the bill were led by one of the oldest, most conservative and representative daily newspapers in the South. They declared that such a law was neither necessary nor expedient. It is a well-known fact that negroes getting on street-cars choose to sit by negroes rather than by white people, and particularly is this so in the case of the badly dressed or otherwise objectionable kind. There are, to be sure, negroes who, pushing themselves forward, choose

to sit by the best, the cleanest, and the most refined people in the car, but these negroes, as a rule, are themselves clean, well dressed, and. in some cases, refined. On the whole, therefore, it was thought to be very unusual that a negro would prefer to sit by a white person, and more so that a white person would be compelled to sit by a negro who, on account of his dress or uncleanliness, was obnoxious. Under the circumstances, the passage of the law was thought to be clearly unnecessary. And, being unnecessary, it was inexpedient, since, without subserving any good purpose, it would certainly provoke ill feeling and possibly friction between the races, as used to happen when the famous "star cars" of the fifties and sixties were operated.

To understand the different opinions expressed regarding the law by several groups of negroes in New Orleans, it is necessary to say a word about the negroes themselves. One group, that which is conducting the educational campaign recently described in The Outlook, favored the passage of the bill, but took no active part in the discussions. With a view to bringing about a friendlier feeling between the races, it is probable that these negroes would have advocated openly the separate car system had not a large number of their own race been strongly opposed to the measure. It was fear of alienating these, and of destroying the growing influence for good already existing, that this group of negroes kept silent. With hardly an exception, they kept away from the meetings and refused to discuss the question except privately or by anonymous communications to the press.

Another group of intelligent negroes, the class that take the leading part in the various non-religious organizations, openly opposed the bill, and took steps, after it was passed, to prevent the law affecting the negro population. An association of women attached to the Masonic Order proposed to run 'bus lines to accommodate

negro passengers, and issued a call to the fifty or more negro organizations in New Orleans to send representatives to a meeting at which the question would be considered. Unfeasible as the scheme was, it nevertheless appealed strongly to the negroes, and at the meetings representatives from nearly all the organizations were present.

It was apparent from the discussions that the "ruling passion" back of it all was a sense of deep humiliation that negroes as a race should be considered unworthy to ride in conveyances with white people. The railway companies had announced their intention of putting wire screens in every car, and to have negroes occupy the rear seats. This idea of sitting behind screens, as if they were wild or obnoxious animals, was another fact contributing to their mortification. Many of them, it was said, took pride in keeping clean, in wearing good clothes, and in behaving well, as much because they could feel at ease in decent company as because it gave them other personal satisfaction. To exclude such negroes from compartments occupied by white people would, they said, be as unjust as it would be to force them to sit in compartments with unworthy representatives of their own race, whom they, as much as the white people, despised. It would be equally unjust to admit obnoxious white people to white compartments and exclude respectable negroes from enjoying the same privilege.

Probably the next most pronounced sentiment of the meetings was a demand for negroes to support one another in business enterprises. To the negroes, the strongest argument in favor of a 'bus line was the fact that it would be a negro enterprise supported by negro capital and conducted for the general benefit of the race in New Orleans. Out of this assertion grew many an urgent appeal for negroes to acquire property and contribute to the general welfare of other negroes by patronizing them in their businesses. This sentiment is growing stronger and stronger every day, and the results of it are more and more apparent. Negroes no longer wish to send their children to white teachers; negro patients demand the services of negro physicians; drugstores, saloons, grocery-stores, coal and

wood shops-in fact, almost every retail business in the city-are conducted on a small scale by negroes, and patronized almost exclusively by members of that

race.

Of course the plan to establish a 'bus line failed. Opposition to it grew as its impracticable features became known, and at the third or fourth meeting nothing more was heard of the idea. The prevailing statement then was that the meeting was for the purpose of devising means to better the negro's condition in New Orleans.

The most sensible suggestion came from a band of ten or twelve negroes, who met several times to oppose the 'bus line movement. This suggestion was that eligible negroes register and vote, and that ineligible ones become educated or acquire property in order to be able to exercise the franchise rights granted under the Constitution of Louisiana. At the pro-'bus line meetings no such sugges tion was hinted at, and even when it was suggested to the negro community by this small band of clear-headed men, it created absolutely no comment.

Some time before the law went into effect it had ceased to be generally discussed by both negroes and whites. At no time during any of the discussions was there the least violence either in language or conduct, and throughout it all the negroes have retained the sympathy of a large part of the white population. There was, of course, no trouble in enforcing the law. What effect it has had on the number of negroes carried by the cars cannot be accurately known, but the conductors say that there has been a large falling off. Several prominent negroes have refused to be seen on a "Jim Crow " car. They prefer to walk. Others ride on the cars, but stand on the platforms rather than be forced to sit behind the

screens.

But, whatever has been the bad or questionable effects of the law, there has been at least one good effect. It has been demonstrated that the negro has more friends among the intelligent white people of New Orleans than he has ever had before; that he is to-day regarded as more capable than ever before of those finer sentiments of which the white race is so justly proud.