should suffer her subjects to be cramped in their mercantile pursuits by
so very insignificant a power as Portugal. Now that it is too late, the
Authorities of Macao have discovered their error, and mended their
manners, by opening the inner harbour to British shipping, by allowing
British merchants to land and ship goods in their own names, and by
lowering the duties on several articles of British manufacture. These
changes, which would have been accepted as boons two years before, were
adopted only when the Portuguese found nearly every British merchant
building warehouses and private dwellings in Hong Kong. Had they been
made prior to the commencement of those buildings, I have good reasons
for supposing, that many of them never would have been begun, their
proprietors having a great dislike to the new British settlement on
account of its reputed unhealthiness,--a reputation, I am sorry to say,
it has too well sustained. Dozens of houses in Macao are already vacant;
dozens more will be so before another six months shall elapse; hundreds
of families who have depended on their house-rent and on money earned in
other ways from British subjects for their daily bread, will be reduced
to want; many of them will and must emigrate to Hong Kong; and Macao,
with its streets of new houses, built in anticipation of the continued
residence of foreign merchants, will sink into utter insignificance, and
become as a place that has been, but is no more. Its Governor will again
have to draw, for the means of paying the expenses of the place, on his
Royal Mistress at Lisbon, who will then reap the well-merited reward of
an illiberal and short-sighted policy.

If a passenger, on his arrival at Macao, lands in the inner harbour, he
has to pass his baggage through the Portuguese Custom-house, where it
will be not only thoroughly examined, but also, very probably,
plundered. A trunk of my own, which _I saw_ carried into this building
along with several others, never came out again: its contents were
valuable, and were much missed by my family. What became of them, I
know not; but certain I am, that the Custom-house authorities of Macao
made away with them. If the passenger chooses to land at the outer
harbour, he encounters the _Chinese_ Custom-house, where he is charged
so much for each package, in the shape of duty, and is allowed to pass
on without bare-faced robbery. Some sixteen years ago, this Chinese
Custom-house was in the practice