years from 8,970 to 9,622. The total population of the Colony increased therefore during those five years by 21,258 souls.
The revenue of the Colony increased proportionately. The revenues of 1877 amounted to $1,005,312, and those of 1880 to $1,069,947, while the revenue of 1881, owing to particular and exceptional causes, rose to $1,324,455. Going into particulars, we find that the revenues of the Colony, which in 1876 had stood at $919,088 increased in 1877 by $86,224. But in 1878 the revenue fell off again by $57,674. Another increase, amounting to $16,457, occurred in 1879, followed in 1880 by an increase amounting to $105,852, and in 1881 by a further, most extraordinary, increase of $254,508, so that the revenue of 1881 totalled up to the above-mentioned respectable sum of $1,324,455. The difference which this rapid development of the financial resources of the Colony, during this administration, presents when compared with the sluggishness of the revenues during the preceding five years, is very striking. The only question is how this enormous increase accrued.
The annual variations of the revenue derived from the working of the Stamp Ordinance naturally depend on the state of the share market. There was in 1877, through the establishment of a Chinese Stamp Agency and through prosecutions instituted against Chinese evading the Stamp Ordinance, an increase, amounting to $24,951, in the yield of the stamp tax. as compared with 1876. A further small increase, amounting to $8,584 was obtained in 1878, followed in 1879 by a decrease of $12,307 which the Blue Book explains as caused by a decrease in the transfer of shares. In 1880 there was a small increase of $5,913. We see therefore that during the first four years of this administration the annual yield of the stamp tax varied very little, being $120,956 in 1877 and $120,678 in 1880. But in 1881, the precise year during which an extraordinary mania for gambling in land and house property seized the Chinese, the stamp tax suddenly produced $165,340, constituting an increase of $44,661. In 1882 the yield of the stamp tax fell again by $18,360 and the Blue Book of that year states that 'this large decrease
