Although opium-smoking is carried to such an excess among some of the Chinese coolies, yet there is no gambling amongst them at the opium shops at Singapore. It is true that this vice has been suppressed, but it is not secretly indulged in; and a gentleman who was formerly the opium farmer, says, “that the consumption of opium is but little affected by gambling, from arrack or samshu being the intoxicating medium used, a much better instrument for raising excitement and stimulating to excessive play than opium, whose effects are much more sedative than exciting.” The consideration of the morals and influence of these customs leads us to a remarkable passage in one of M. Quetelet’s works, it refers to the certainty of natural laws in states as well as individuals:——“All those things which appear to be left to the free will, the passions, or the degree of intelligence of men, are regulated by laws as fixed, immutable, and eternal as those which govern the phenomena of the natural world. No one knows the day or the hour of his own death; and nothing appears more entirely accidental than the birth of a boy or of a girl in any given case. But how many out of a million of men living together in one country, shall have died in ten, twenty, forty, or sixty years, how many boys and girls shall be born in a million of births; all this is as certain, nay, much more certain, than any human truth.” The statistics of courts of justice have disclosed to us the regular repetition of the same crimes, and have established the fact—incomprehensive to our understandings, because we do not know the connecting links—that in every large country, the number of offences, and of each kind of offence, may be predicted for every coming year, with the same certainty as the number of the births and of the natural deaths. Of every 100 persons accused before the supreme tribunal in France, 61 are condemned; in England, 71. The variations, on an average, amount hardly to 1/100th part of the whole. We can predict with confidence, for fifteen years to come, the number of suicides generally—that of the cases of suicide by fire-arms, and that of the cases of suicide by hanging. Every large number of phenomena of the same kind, which rise and fall periodically, leads to a fixed proportion. This is the law of large numbers to which all things and all events without exception, are subject. These laws have nothing to do with the essence of vice and virtue in the moral world, but with the external causes, and the effects they produce in human society. No one denies the influence of education, and of habits of labour and order on the conduct of men, but no one thinks of regarding this moral conduct as a mere result of those habits. Good education and improved cultivation diminish the number of offences, as well as that of the annual deaths in our tables of mortality.