As to the future for R. the now asks general "sanction to apply the funds to Education, Interfereters, Hospitals, Charity &c."; his general line of argument is logically vicious, (it may be expressed thus)
Measures to Suppress gambling have a claim on these funds.
Measures to suppress & hand to diminution of crime
:. Diminution of Crime has claim on these funds.
Demination of crime tends to moral improvement of Chinese
Moral improvement of th: has &c
Moral improvement of Chinese is for several benefit to Colony
.. General benefit of Colony has &c (However Sir R.M. is too shrewd actually to take the last step, but generally diverges into "the misfortune of the amount of the funds & the possibility in the last resort of throwing it into the sea";) the fault of his reasoning is that while the conclusion of each of this syllogism is a particular proposition, he treats it practically as universal.
Lord Granville has already minuted that while he will not consent to any such objects having in principle anything like a permanent claim, he will consider special contributions such as "the hospital, (the despatch on this subject has not yet come back from Downing Street, thereby a letter to the Treasury is hanging fire; also The despatch on 8704 is not yet gone, not having been signed in time for the last mail).
But beside the two questions of
(1) Adjudication of past accounts
(2) Application of present surplus
there is a third to be disposed of viz:
(3) Prevention of future accumulations of such funds.
This is possible by a reduction of the merely to cover the capentes as sanctioned:
the original instructions (repeated more than once) were "Limit the amount to cover Expense"); but Sir R. M. had also repeated by Secretary stated his basis of calculation (vide his despatch of 1868) as such that, while it gave them the unfair profit, guaranteed their exerting themselves to suppress illegal gambling?
Sir R. M.'s position is untenable (a) in principle, because the amount of profit does not affect our supposed moral grounds for establishing the system, while the amount of
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