most of the mercantile class of the city,—shopkeepers, mechanics, manufacturers,—in fact, all the middle class of the people. Nor is the reason at all difficult to state by any one who knows our community. When the people of native and part native birth prosper, business is good and the community is prosperous. The prosperity brought by the reciprocity treaty and the sugar plantations had disappointed our expectations. The money went into the hands of the few, who safely invested in foreign interests and enterprises every dollar of it, save the amount of wages paid to foreign and Mongolian labor. But the advantages to be received from the charter of this, which in some American localities is called a “gift enterprise,” would be immediately put in circulation among our own people, because spent on much-needed public works, and thus would bring some little prosperity to them parallel to that enjoyed by foreigners.
I am not defending lotteries. They are not native productions of my country, but introduced into our “heathen” land by so-called Christians, from a Christian nation, who have erected monuments, universities, and legislative halls by that method. I am simply explaining what this bill intended, because, by the reports sent to their correspondents in the United States, the missionary party represented me as a grand vendor of lottery tickets, by which I was to become rich and powerful; whereas the scheme, be it good or bad, would not have been to my individual profit, but to that of my native people.
Third,—I proposed to issue licenses for the impor-
