the road to India from the East as Gibraltar opens the gateway from the West. As the opening of the Suez Canal, with its consequent increase of European trade with China, enhanced the importance of Hongkong as a commercial emporium, so the universal employment of steamers in the navies of all the great Maritime Powers, which likewise followed from the opening of the Suez Canal, gave Hongkong a new important function to fulfil as the only coaling station of the British navy in the Far East. But, as it took Hongkong merchants several years to realize how much nearer, to London, Hongkong now was, so it took Her Majesty's Government and the British public several decades of years to realize the increased political and strategical importance Hongkong had assumed, by that same commercial event, in the general scheme of British Colonial defence, and its consequent need of first class fortifications.
As to the individual Governors of this epoch, one feels tempted to say that apparently 'each man begins the world afresh and the last man repeats the blunders of the first.' However, it is remarkable how little really depended upon the character, wisdom or energy, of any of these exalted individuals. Sir J. Bowring, the man of ideas, had rare capabilities and was brimming over with fruitful schemes, but, to use Lord Clarendon's words, 'events which could not be foreseen and which got (or rather all along were) beyond his control' left him stranded powerless. Sir H. Robinson, Fortune's favourite, was apparently the most successful Governor of Hongkong, thanks to an adventitious prosperity of commerce, but if his administration had fallen into his successor's time of financial insolvency, he would have been deprived of all the means of success and left as helpless as his successor. Sir R. MacDonnell, the autocrat, was perhaps the greatest, most energetic and powerful, Governor that ever ruled over this much-ruled Colony, but adverse circumstances, bad times, opposition on the part of the colonists and dissensions with the Colonial Office rulers, clipped the wings of his usefulness and success. Sir A. Kennedy, the amiable, is the model of a successful and most popular Governor who
