he public cash-box is filled, you learn after
plodding investigation. The merits of direct and indirect taxation, even
of the Henry George program for raising the public wind, have never been
seriously considered by Portugal's administrators in the East, nor has
municipal ownership of utilities been discussed, you discover. The
official bigwigs who administer Macao know that it is as necessary for
the Chinaman to gamble as to have food--and the colony accordingly
legalizes fan-tan and semi-daily lotteries, supplies the requisite
machinery for carrying on the games, and reaps a _benefice_ for its
enterprise that runs the community without further ado. That is all
there is to Macao's fiscal policy. Hong Kong, only forty miles across
the estuary, bristles with commercial prosperity. The British government
permits Hong Kongers to bet on horse-races, buy and sell stocks, and
promote devious companies, but forbids fan-tan and lotteries. There is,
consequently, a daily flow of men, women, and dollars between Hong Kong
and Macao. Besides, no traveler not actively engaged in uplifting his
fellow-man, feels that he has seen the Orient unless he passes a few
hours or days in endeavoring to lure fortune at the gambling tables.

The colonial lottery is no more dignified or important than a policy
game in an American town, and seems to be but the Western idea clouded
by its adaptation to Asiatic uses, tourists affirm.

Macao licenses twenty fan-tan places, and these run all day and all
night, and are graded in their patrons from tourists and natives of
fortune and position down to joints admitting 'rickshaw coolies,
sailors, and harbor riffraff. The gilded establishment claiming
attention from travelers is conducted by a couple of Chinese worthies,
by name Ung Hang and Hung Vo, according to the business card
deferentially handed you at your hotel, and the signs in front of it and
the legends painted on great lanterns proclaim it as a first-chop _Casa
de Jogo_, and a gambling-house that is "No. 1" in all respects. The
gamesters whose garments proclaim them to be middle-class Chinamen pack
themselves like sardines into the room where the table is situated, for
they obviously believe in watching their interests at close hand. The
floor above, by reason of the rail-protected opening in the center, is
little more than a spacious gallery; but it is there that the big
gamblers congregate, natives in costly fabrics, and whose rotund bodies