Page:Crime and government at Hong Kong.pdf/17

 of such gravity, that the levity with which the Chief Justice of Hong Kong treated him, when, to use his own words, "he threw himself on the mercy of the Court," was still a matter of surprise to every man.

Sir John Bowring himself, in 1856, when Dr. Bridges was absent from the Colony, had made no secret,—either to the Colonial Secretary (Mr. Mercer), whom he nevertheless replaced, or to myself, who protested from the first against his appointment,—of his Excellency's personal dislike to Dr. Bridges. He had even justified that dislike by imputations of a very serious kind, suggested by the notorious fact, that a great part of the Doctor's emoluments, when Acting Attorney General, before my arrival in the Colony, were derived from pawnbroking loans to low Chinese, upon deposits of opium, and at exorbitant interest.

It was equally notorious, that the animosity was reciprocal; and it was admitted by Dr. Bridges, at at the trial already referred to, that, whilst filling the office of Acting Attorney General, in 1855, he had induced the same defendant (Mr. Tarrant, the editor of the Friend of China, a Hong Kong newspaper), to insert a very celebrated libel upon Sir John Bowring; and that he had even sent him the libel with the view to such publication.

In fact, the intensity of their mutual hatred, was even greater than that which, as will presently appear, existed at the same time, between two of Dr. Bridges' friends, the Lieutenant Governor, and