(A.D. 1833) by an Act of Parliament establishing British authority in the East and by the substitution (A.D. 1834) of an independent community of lusty free traders for the servile and effete East India Company. The domestic alliance contracted after A.D. 1034 between Europe and Asia on terms so humiliating for the former, was bound to result in a temporary divorce. That divorce was solemnly and emphatically pronounced, though with patent unwillingness, by Commissioner Lin (A.D. 1839) acting on behalf of Asia, whereupon Captain Elliot, acting as the representative of Europe, secured Hongkong as a cradle for the offspring of that unhappy union (born A.D. 1841), that is to say for the Colony whose divine destiny it is to reconcile its parents hereafter in a happier reunion by a due subordination of Asia to Europe. The elder shall serve the younger and be taught to love and obey—such is the historic problem which Hongkong has to solve in the dim future.
This conception of Hongkong as the vantage point from which the Anglo-Saxon race has to work out its divine mission of promoting the civilization of Europe in the East, and establishing the rule of constitutional liberty on the continent of Asia and on the main of the Pacific, is not a mere fancy. However imperfectly the problem may have been stated here, the foregoing remarks undoubtedly contain an approximate formulation of a true historic lesson which he who runs may read. Now this lesson, however it may be modified and amended by a critical reader, provides the student of the history of Hongkong with n definite standard by which he can measure the progress of the Colony and judge the merits of its Governors at any successive period. If the reader is once clear as to what it is that the past history of Hongkong shews the purport of the establishment of Hongkong to have been in the providence of God, he will have no difficulty in determining, with regard to the public measures or public men of any period, whether they marred or promoted the Colony's progress towards fulfilling its divine mission.
