which had guided Captain Elliot. By his Triad Society's Ordinance he sacrificed the rudimentary principles of European civilization and the British axiom of the liberty of the subject to a cringing subservience of the aims of Mandarin tyranny in its most barbaric aspects. By his buccaneering expedition of April, 1847, he injured British prestige in the East even more than his predecessor had ever done. By his monopolies and farms and petty regulations he hampered and injured the foreign and native commerce of the Colony and nullified the freedom of the port. The result of the misgovernment, initiated by Sir H. Pottinger and continued by Sir J. Davis, was that Parliament had to step in to warn the Colonial Office against the mischievous policy pursued at Hongkong, and to rescue the Colony from plainly and imminently impending ruin by a return to the principles established by Captain Elliot. Let the reader who doubts the soundness of the above analysis of Hongkong's early history ponder the incontrovertible fact that the policy of autocracy, monopoly and protectionism, pursued by Sir H. Pottinger and Sir J. Davis, not only drove commerce away from Hongkong and made the Colony contemptible in the eyes of the Chinese, but brought the settlement to the verge of commercial and financial ruin and delivered British commerce at Hongkong, under the shadow of the British flag, into a bondage of Chinese mandarindom, as effective, as despicable and as galling as that tinder which the East India Company and the British free traders ever groaned whilst located at Canton. What staved off the impending ruin was a reversion to the principles of Elliot.
The foregoing remarks may serve to show that the formulation, by the Parliamentary Committee of 1847, of the programme essential for Hongkong's prosperity, was but a comprehensive re-statement of the principles which led to and guided the original establishment of the Colony. Those principles, discarded for a while by Sir H. Pottinger and Sir J. Davis to the Colony's manifest injury, were re-introduced by Sir G. Bonham who conformed his administration to those principles, though he did not agree with all the propositions which the Parliamentary
