Excise revenue beyond the Stamp duty. Had Your Grace not forbidden the receipt of Revenue from the Licenses for any gaming houses, it might have been preferable to have made both ends meet.
Those houses will open in a few days, in accordance with arrangements completed so far to render it unfair to forbid it. I shall thereby be able to gather experience of a valuable kind from their working. Nevertheless, as I never suggested any plan for merely opening gaming houses, but one accompanied by Conditions calculated to ensure Chinese cooperation in putting down illegal gaming and with it the existing corruption of the Police, I mean to close them on the 1st of next January, and therefore the Revenue derivable thence, though imposed for merely Police purposes, cannot bring the collateral relief it might have afforded to the finances of the Colony during next year.
And here I may explain that in computing a Revenue of $100,000 derivable from that Source during 1868, I did not thereby calculate on the gambling Licenses necessarily producing a regular monthly receipt between $8000 and $9000. On the contrary, I freely confess that, in so new an experiment, I felt entirely at a loss to ascertain what sum would suffice to meet the legitimate Police expenses.