Page:Europe in China.djvu/11

with their Chinese hangers-on settled at the Canton Factories. But Its earliest prototype can be discerned in the previous settlements of the Portuguese and Dutch and more particularly of the agents of the East-India Company who were unconsciously working out in China, as well as in India, the international problem with the solution of which Hongkong is specially concerned. When, under the impulse of the awakening free trade spirit in England, the East-India Company had to withdraw from the field (1834), the British free-traders at Canton continued to represent Europe in China, and, when driven out thence, transplanted to Hongkong (1841) those unifying commercial and political principles which are to the present day the underlying elements of progress in the historic evolution of Hongkong. But as the history of the Hongkong community presents thus an unbroken chain of influences connecting the political mission of Europe with the present politics of Asia, so also the successive administrations of the government of this Colony have the same inner unity. Though each Governor is but a transient visitor, each possessed of his own idiosyncracies, and each controlled by an ever shifting series of Secretaries of State for the Colonies, behind them all is that ideal but none the less real entity, the genius of British public opinion, which inspires and overrules them all. That genius, feeling its