world was passing through a crisis. Great houses were falling on all sides. Hongkong, connected now with every great bourse in the world, was suffering likewise and property was seriously depreciated. Credit became instable. Men were everywhere suspicious, unsettled in mind, getting irritable and economically severe. Yet great public works, the Praya, the new Gaol, the Mint, the Water-Works, the sea wall at Kowloon, commenced or constructed in a period of unexampled prosperity, had now to be carried on, completed or maintained, from the scanty resources of an impoverished and well-nigh insolvent Treasury. New laws were clearly needed for the regulation of the Chinese whose gambling habits were filling the streets with riot and honeycombing the Police Force with corruption. Crime was rampant and the gaols overflowing with prisoners. Piracy, flourishing as ever before, was believed to have not only its secret lairs among the low class of marine-store dealers but the support of wealthy Chinese firms and to enjoy the connivance of men in the Police Force. A sense of insecurity as to life and property was again, as in days gone by, taking possession of the public mind. The cry among the colonists now was for a strong and resolute Governor, one who would give his undivided attention to the needs and interests of the Colony and govern it accordingly, undeterred by what the foreign community of Hongkong now called 'the vicious system of colonial administration in vogue at home.' Sir J. Bowring, they said, had attended to everything under the sun except the government of the Island. Sir H. Robinson, they opined, had governed the Colony to please his masters in Downing Street and with a view to advance himself to a better appointment. And as to Mr. Mercer, everybody agreed that he deliberately 'let well enough alone.' The sort of man the colonists now desired for their next Governor was a dictator rather, with a strong mind and will, than a weak faddist or an obsequious henchman of the machine public. The cry was for a Cæsar.
As Providence would have it, it so happened that it was just such a man, a Cæsar every inch of him, that the Colonial Office,
