THE STRAITS SETTLEMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent)

Otago Witness, Issue 2691, 11 October 1905, Page 27

THE STRAITS SETTLEMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent)

WELLINGTON, October !/. llr P. S. Lawrie, a Penang oommefcial man, who during a previous visit here purchased several of the Union Company's smaller steamers, is again in Wellington. He eay3 the question of questions in his ■own colony when he left six weeks ago was Ihe purchase by the Straits Government of the Tanjong Pagai Dock Company's monopoly of wharves and docks at Singapore and Penang, the -principal ports of the colony. TII9 price, which was to be , settled by arbitration, would run into three

or four millions sterling. There were four or five dry docks in Singapore, and there was apparently no doubt that in the future Singapore would become an Imperial naval base. Trade had been rather bad in the colony during the past 18 months, but it was showing a distinct improvement. The Germans were showing the greatest amount of enterprise in the shipping and general merchandise, and no other nation, neither English nor * merican, showed anything like the same activity. The Chinese at Singapore and Penang — and there was a very large number of Chinese in the Straits Settlement— were just beginning, when Mr Lawrie left, to follow the example of merchants in China by applying the Loyeott to American goods. They were acting thus, in sympathy with theic fellows on the mainland, as a reply to America's Chinese Exolusion Act. Mr Lawrie does

not anticipate any yellow peril. Australian fears, he says, are groundless. " The Chinese are a very conservative people, and they will not leave their own country for another unless they hear extraordinarily good accounts of ifc from their relatives and friends. As a matter of fact, they cannot get any mor© Chinese to go over to South Africa, and even in the Straits Settlement, where there are so many Chinese — and they are essentially people who like to keep to themselves, and have plenty of their own people about them, — they could not get enough to supply the demand. And as we are close to China." added Mr Lawrie, "how much more difficult will it be to go to Australia, wiiere difficulties rather than inducements are to be met? In the Straits Settlement we find, the Ohine.se very quiet, and they do the greater bulk of our work."