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Rh began to talk seditiously of united resistance. So great was the popular excitement that the Governor became afraid and announced his willingness to reduce the assessment made by the two official valuators (Tarrant and Pope) by 40 per cent. (July 14, 1840). In spite of this concession the leading paper of the Colony declared this tax to be a most tyrannical and intolerable encroachment upon the rights of the inhabitants, because passed by a Council in which the community was not represented. However the Ordinance received Her Majesty's consent (December 25, 1845), and the people soon learned to submit to it gracefully. Not satisfied with the financial results of these measures. Sir John added, by Ordinances 3 and 4 of 1845, duties on the retail of tobacco and fermented liquors (July 7, 1845). So great was his craving for monopolies that he persisted in farming out the monopoly of fishing in Hongkong waters, though it brought in only 17 shillings for the year 1845. His great grief and trouble was 'the total absence of a custom house establishment' in the free port of Hongkong. He was decidedly of opinion that, as most of the available spots for building purposes had already been disposed of (thanks to the gambling mania which his predecessor and himself had unconsciously fostered), no great expansion of the land revenue could be looked for in the future. Consequently he turned his attention to licenses and excise farms and among these he commended to Her Majesty's Government the opium farm as being 'the most productive source of revenue and one that should increase with, the progress of the place.'

When the Legislative Council passed the first Hongkong Opium Ordinance (November 20, 1844), the Colonial Treasurer, R. M. Martin, strongly protested against this Government measure on the ground that private vice should not be made a source of public revenue. Finding his protest disregarded, he forthwith applied for leave of absence. When this application was refused, he resigned his office and returned to England (July 12, 1845), where he thenceforth laboured, with a pen dipped in gall, to prove that Hongkong, whose majestic peak he compared