all these will fall, and he who steps in with the higher incentives to virtue will find it a hard task to persuade
his hearers that what Government
has pronounced normal and
proper
inevitable is in truth but a removable
…
and that what in such
deformity,
bright quarter has been proclaimed
an
to be a social necessity is not an individual necessity also
8. I am persuaded that no amount of revenue could compensate Government for the loss of prestige which would be occasioned
by turning into a source of gain and
thereby giving
its sanction to
what is considered
by the
intelligent classes of the community
to be purely
and intrinsically vicious.
That
224
& gambling bears the character among educated Chinese there can
be small question. By their criminal code the Keeper of a gaming shop is liable to be punished with eighty blows, and to forfeit his house to
the Crown; and
though
we know
that in Chinese cities, through the venality of the officials, there is seldom much difficulty in finding houses of this description, yet the
stigma of illegality and immorality is retained. In Staunton's penal
laws of China appears the note = "There is probably
no vice
to which the Chinese are more
addicted than that of
gaming
generally
speaking
it is
the vice of the lower classes;