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O Europeans residing in Hongkong or China, I need not offer any excuse for inviting them to take up this book. The natural desire to learn to understand the present by a consideration of the past, will plead with them better than I could do. But the general reader, in England and elsewhere, I entreat for a reconsideration of the popularly accepted view that but little importance, beyond that of a curio, attaches to Hongkong, its community and position, or indeed to European relations with China.

At first sight, indeed, the Colony of Hongkong appears like an odd conglomeration of fluctuating molecules of nationalities, whose successive Governors seem to be but extraneous factors adventitiously regulating or disturbing the heavings of this incongruous mass. But in reality the Hongkong community is solidarily one. Though an unbridged chasm does yawn in its midst, waiting for a to close it and meanwhile separating the outward social life of Europeans and Chinese, the people of Hongkong are inwardly