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opinion that it is highly desirable to regulate the gaming houses in the Colony or in other words to tolerate their existence by legal enactments, that the uncurbed might possibly aggravate certain evils, I think that a cautious and stringent concurrent legislation might remedy those evils, and preserve to the community at large the benefits that necessarily arise from an increased revenue and a more efficient police. Seven tenths of the native population at the time gamble more or less clandestinely and will continue to do so, for the police, owing to circumstances over which the Government has no control, viz., scarcity of respectable Europeans, unfitness of the Chinese character for police purposes, will never be able to exercise that thorough surveillance over a densely crowded population which is necessary for the suppression of gaming. From an investigation which recently took place at the Police office it appeared, that there was not a single office connected with the administration of justice in which the lowest Chinese subordinates did not levy a daily blackmail from the gaming houses, and that there were also organised bands of vagabonds in the Colony who also extorted daily sums from such establishments, thus we have two immense evils.