E-text prepared by Turgut Dincer
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
([http://www.pgdp.net])
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
([https://archive.org])

BETTING AND GAMBLING

BETTING & GAMBLING
A NATIONAL EVIL

EDITED BY
B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE
AUTHOR OF ‘POVERTY’

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905

All rights reserved

TO THE
MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE
OF
THE YORK ANTI-GAMBLING LEAGUE
AT WHOSE SUGGESTION
THIS WORK WAS UNDERTAKEN

PREFACE

Until comparatively recent years, betting and gambling were largely confined in this country to the wealthy few. Now, however, the practice has spread so widely among all classes of the community that those who know the facts name gambling and drinking as national evils of almost equal magnitude.

There is no doubt that the social conscience is as yet only very partially awakened to the widespread character of the gambling evil and to its grievous consequences. Like a cancer, the evil thing has spread its poisonous roots throughout the length and breadth of the land, carrying with them, where they strike, misery, poverty, weakened character, and crime.

Nor is the practice any longer spontaneous. It is encouraged and organised by an army of social parasites in the shape of bookmakers and their touts; these men or women (for the “profession” is not confined to men) pursue their calling in every town of Britain—indeed, there are probably but few villages or large workshops which are free from them. In many places, indeed, they regularly call for “orders,” the itinerant packman or agent combining this with his recognised business. Even little children have been known to bet their slate pencils in the playgrounds of our State schools, while women and girls in all ranks of society no longer regard the practice as unwomanly.

And yet, in spite of the acknowledged magnitude of the evil, there are, with a very few notable exceptions, no organised efforts to check it. The apparent apathy of the nation to the extraordinary spread of this mischief in its midst is in sharp contrast to the great efforts organised to combat intemperance. For this there are probably three main causes:—

1. Ignorance on the part of the general public as to the rapid growth and the mischief of the practice.

2. Lack of clear thought regarding the ethics of the question.

3. The difficulty of suggesting practical steps to counteract so insidious an evil.

The purpose of this book is to supply, in concise and readily accessible form, information which may meet these needs. After a preliminary chapter devoted to the ethics of Betting and Gambling, facts are stated concerning the extent of the evil and its effects on national life. The present position of legislation affecting betting is then dealt with, and suggestions are made as to needed improvements in the law. A concluding chapter considers remedial measures outside the sphere of legislation. In the Appendix additional information is given, which, it is hoped, may be useful, more particularly to speakers and writers, together with a Bibliography of books and papers upon the subject. All the articles are by writers who have given special attention to the topics with which they deal. Three of them, viz. those by John A. Hobson, B. Seebohm Rowntree, and “The Deluded Sportsman,” have appeared before. Two, though originally written for this book, have appeared in periodicals which have a limited circulation in this country, and the third has appeared in pamphlet form.

B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE.

York, April 1905.

CONTENTS

THE ETHICS OF GAMBLING

By John A. Hobson

Gambling is the determination of the ownership of property by appeal to chance. By chance is here implied the resultant of a play of natural forces that cannot be controlled or calculated by those who appeal to it. In tossing “heads or tails” for the possession of a coin, neither party has any knowledge or control of the adjustment of forces which determines upon which side the coin will fall, or if by practice the tosser acquires such knowledge or control, he cannot possibly predict or control the “call” of his opponent, which thus keeps the determination of the issue within the realm of “Chance.”

Gambling may be described as “pure” or “mixed” according as the determining power of chance is or is not blended with other powers. Few so-called games of chance are entirely destitute of skill, even if the skill consists entirely of speed or accuracy in calculating “chances.” Where such skill plays a large and a continuous part, the game ceases to be classed as “gambling,” though chance may exercise a quite considerable influence in determining the result. In betting on horse-races and in commercial gambling superior knowledge of some of the determinant causes may so qualify the chance that, from the standpoint of those who have such knowledge, the operation ceases to be gambling. If such knowledge is equally attainable by all those who “speculate,” the game becomes one of skill; if it consists in genuine “tips” or private knowledge, the operation is fraudulent. This last fact is generally recognised: all gamesters denounce betting on “certainties.” Again, both on the turf and the stock exchange chance may be reduced or even eliminated by an actual manipulation of the forces so as to yield a result favourable to the interests of some of those who pose as gamblers. But when the result supposed to rest on chance is known or controlled by any sort of skill, fraud, or force, the case is not one of pure gambling; for though it is a matter of significance that gambling commonly keeps company with cheating, the latter is not gambling.

Where the skilful draftsmanship of a lottery prospectus allures the dull or sanguine reader into staking his money, by deceiving him as to the size of his chance of winning, such trickery, though designed to appeal to the gambling instinct of investors, is not itself an act or a part of gambling: it is simply fraud, though not necessarily fraud in a legal sense.

On the other hand, when the terms of a lottery are clearly understood by those who stake their money, the mere fact that the managers arrange the speculation so as to procure for themselves a known and certain gain, offering prizes admittedly of less value than the aggregate of the stakes, need not debar us from regarding the proceeding as “pure gambling” so far as the players are concerned. So with the roulette-table at Monte Carlo: the players are aware that the chances are favourable to the bank over a prolonged piece of play, they even know the precise amount of this bias. But this knowledge does not prevent their play from ranking as pure gambling, for no skill or knowledge or trickery on their part can enter in as a determinant of the result.

Thus an honestly managed lottery, or roulette, may fairly serve as a type of pure gambling which will serve to enable us to test the psychology and ethics of the proceeding.

Before approaching the distinctively moral aspects of gambling, we must clearly realise its intellectual reactions. The rational basis of the acquisition of property is the “natural” relation of effort to satisfaction. A man who converts an unshaped piece of matter into an object of human utility may be said to have a “natural” property in it. And this in a double sense. The expenditure of human energy given out in this piece of labour requires recuperation: this recuperation is achieved by “consuming” that which he has made, or its equivalent obtained by processes of equal exchange. The effort of production requires the satisfaction of consumption. Thus it is commonly recognised that labour, or human effort, is the natural basis of the right of property. Or, regarding the same relation on its psychical side with reference to motive, we perceive that a property in that which he has made must be accorded to the maker wherever any painful effort of production is required, in order to induce his will to sanction the effort. In a society where social forces co-operate with individual effort a full property in that which a man is said to make may not be essential, but that is because no man working in society and for a market can truly be said to make the whole of anything, much less its “value” when it is made. But everywhere some proportion of property must be guaranteed to the individual who is required to exert himself in productive labour. Any form of theft, fraud, extortion, “sweating,” on the part of individuals or governments, is liable to interfere with this physical and psychical adjustment between production and consumption, output of effort and intake of satisfaction, which forms the natural or rational basis of individual property. Just in proportion as this rational character is firmly and clearly stamped upon the processes of the acquisition of property do we possess security of social order and progress. When property comes to any one in any other way, its transfer has an “unreasonable” character. So a society where force or fraud habitually or frequently displaces this sane process of acquiring property, where some persons eat bread sudore vultus alieni and others consequently sweat without eating, is not only economically enfeebled, but is irrationally constituted. And this unreason in the social organism corrupts and derationalises the individual members. But even an unjustly ordered society, where the domination of one class is accompanied by the subjection of another, where organised parasitism or plunder prevails, differs from “anarchy” as regards its reactions upon the intelligence of man. A bad system, the worst of systems, is less derationalising than no system. So the habitual exploitation of the poor by the rich, the “have-nots” by the “haves,” though substantially irrational in the modes of acquisition of property involved, is less demoralising than the abandonment of the determination of property to pure chance.

Gambling involves the denial of all system in the apportionment of property: it plunges the mind in a world of anarchy, where things come upon one and pass from one miraculously. It does not so manifestly sin against the canons of justice as do other bad modes of transfer,—theft, fraud, sweating,—for every one is said to have an equal chance; but it inflicts a graver damage on the intellect. Based as it is on an organised rejection of all reason as a factor, it removes its devotees into a positive atmosphere of miracles, and generates an emotional excitement that inhibits those checks which reason more or less contrives to place upon emotional extravagances. The essence of gambling consists in an abandonment of reason, an inhibition of the factors of human control. In the history of mankind, civilisation of the individual has chiefly consisted in and been measured by this increased capacity of rational control—a slow, gradual, imperfect taming of the animal instincts which made for emotional anarchy of conduct.

This assertion of rational control, implying some sort of plan in life, restraints on conduct, and trust in orderly processes of phenomena, has doubtless been most imperfectly established even in the picked members of the more highly civilised races. But such as it is, it represents order in society and progress in humanity.

The practice of gambling is thus exhibited as a deliberate reversion to those passions and that mental attitude which characterise the savage or pre-human man in his conduct and his outlook. There lurk in “civilised” man the remnants of survivals of countless ages of pre-human and of savage heredity, anarchic passions associated with barbarous superstitions. The order of civilisation claims to have killed or atrophied the grosser forms of these atavistic tendencies, but many of them are not dead; social control and education of individual habits keeps them in subordination or acquiescence, but on temptation they are ready to awake. Just as war and certain forms of sport can call from the caverns of heredity brutish traits whose presence was utterly unknown to their possessors, so the interest of gambling discovers in many natures a similarly fatal inheritance.

Maeterlinck has recently sought to find a quasi-rational basis for “luck” in the occasional revival of certain primitive instincts of self-protection which, seldom needed in the higher progress of humanity, have died down and rarely assert themselves. Whether such latent powers of extra-rational warning exist or ever did exist, we need not here discuss; it is, however, quite evident that the widespread belief in “luck” among gamblers is a reversion to a form of unreason which carries no sound instinct of direction with it. It is fair to adduce this belief in luck as an important testimony to the derationalising influences of gambling.

It does not seem true that the gambling habit pervades only or chiefly the least intelligent types of men. Among habitual gamblers on the stock exchange, on the turf and in the card-room, and wherever skill tempers chance, high degrees of cunning, memory, and judgment are often found, while certain qualities of determination and of self-command are conducive to success. But while many men possessing these qualities are drawn to games or business pursuits where a strong element of chance is present, there is no real affinity between any of these personal powers and pure gambling. It is not, for instance, true that skill, judgment, or self-command is of the least assistance at the roulette-table or at rouge-et-noir. The fact that these qualities are so commonly regarded as serviceable to the player may be cited as a conspicuous evidence of the derationalising influence of gambling even in the case of those who do not gamble. For in reality they are only useful in proportion as the game is not pure gambling.

The curious cunning expended in devising “systems” and the attention to multifarious incidents of “luck” indicate a genuine inhibition of the reasoning faculty. Both modes of manipulating chance are vitiated by the same two fallacies. Belief in the efficacy of a “system” implies that a series of consecutive coups is a causally connected chain, whereas, in fact, the result of each coup is entirely unaffected by the coup which preceded or follows it. The “system” gambler also believes that he is able to forecast to some extent the drift or current of chances which makes this causal connection. Similarly with the cruder superstitions, such as the notion that a virgin player will win his opening bout of play, or that turning one’s chair or changing one’s seat will break a spell of bad luck: they also imply that a sequence of separately determined events is in some unintelligible way a mutually determined group, and that a tendency running through the series can be altered by a casual or purposed action which is interjected from outside. The amazing hold which these superstitious notions obtain over persons of education and intelligence is a striking testimony to the intellectual havoc wrought by gambling. How insidious is the illusion about runs of luck may be shown by the ease with which the minds of most persons, who are averse to gambling and would deride the notion of a “system,” fall into the snare when it is set in the following form: Enter a room where rouge-et-noir is going on and learn that red has turned up twenty times in succession, when the next card is in the act of being drawn there is an almost irresistible tendency to expect black, from a first impulsive judgment which has false reference to the general improbability of red turning up twenty-one times running. Most persons, including trained scientists to whom I have put the case, requiring an immediate reply, have admitted that they would be disposed to bet against red.

A practice so corrupting to the intelligence not only of the habitué but even of the casual spectator stands condemned as a formidable enemy of education and of intellectual order.

In thus exposing the irrationality of gambling, both as a mode of transferring property and as a mental occupation, I have implicitly exposed its immorality also. Its repudiation of equitable order involves at once an intellectual and a moral descent to a lower plane of thought and feeling. Perhaps no other human interest, not based on purely physical craving, arouses so absorbing a passion: alcoholism itself scarcely asserts a stronger dominion over its devotees.

So widespread has been the zest for gambling among whole races as widely different in character and environment as the British, the Zulu, the Chinese, that we are almost driven to seek some physiological root for the passion. To give an added weight of interest to chance by attaching to it a transfer of property seems to imply a love of hazard as a permanent feature in humanity. Though the transfer of property by gambling not merely feeds the passion but imports grave moral injuries of its own, it cannot be said to originate gambling or to be essential to the play of the interest in chance or hazard. The folly and the social injury of gambling grow with the proportion of the stakes; but high stakes, while they concentrate and dramatise the play, do not create the interest.

Educationalists and other reformers who would exorcise the gambling habit must look deeper for its origin and early sustenance. The fevered excitement of the gambler is part of an exaggerated reaction against certain excesses of orderly routine imposed upon the life in which he lives. The dull, prolonged monotony of uninteresting drudgery which constitutes the normal workaday life of large masses of people drives them to sensational reactions which are crude and violent. The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. Their work affords no considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression, and the interest, achievement, and surprise which are ordinary human qualities. It is easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however well-ordered) human life would be vacant of interest and intolerable: in other words, it is a prime condition of humanity that the unexpected in the form of happening and achievement should be adequately represented in every life. Art in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, and play, as interested but unproductive effort, are essential. But where either the physical or mental exhaustion of industry, or other external conditions, prevent the due cultivation or the expression of wholesome art or play instincts, baser attractions usurp their place. It is impossible, and it would be undesirable, to deny to man the satisfaction of his instinctive zest in the unexpected, the hazardous, the disorderly: he needs not only achievement but accident to sustain his interest in life. The latter factor may yield largely to the former in highly civilised man, in a society where varied modes of art offer varied stimuli to self-expression and achievement: the artist who is a true artist is least likely to be a gambler. But a margin of disorder, or hazard and unreason, will always remain a factor in the interest of life: hence an element of unordered play as distinct from art will always survive.

Even a moral order imposed in the public interest, if too uniform and rigorous, will arouse, not merely in bad but in good natures, reactions towards lawlessness. There is much truth in what Charles Lamb wrote of his interest in the Seventeenth Century Comedy:—

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses where the hunter cannot follow me—I am back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it.

So it is with all sorts and conditions of men: the incalculable, the lawless remains an ineradicable factor in life.

Where there is little or no provision of or stimulus to art, the crudest and most sensational play tends to absorb the entire margin of energy left after work is done.

In such a state of society every field of activity capable of generating such elements of hazard is pressed into the service of gambling: sports and business occupations become popular in proportion as they can by their structure be made to minister to the craving for hazard; every sort of competition where a sufficient element of the incalculable exists is pervaded by gambling.

If the monotony of toil drives large numbers of workers to seek violent sensational relief in gambling, the ennui of idleness prompts the leisured classes to the same abuse. A totally or partially parasitic life (where little or no socially directed labour is imposed), though leaving a large margin of free energy, makes more for dilettantism than for art, and depriving play of its healthy interest as a relief from work induces a “boredom” which fosters gambling among other sensational extravagances. Moreover in the rich, leisured class the disproportion between earning and spending loosens the just sense of property more than in any other class, so that large miraculous transfers of property by betting seem less discrepant with the ordinary conditions of their life.

This line of diagnosis makes it quite apparent what are the real supports of gambling, and how the vice inheres in the wider “social problem,” only to be cured or abated in proportion as sounder general conditions of social order are obtained. When we regard the actual life of an ordinary worker in a factory town we can easily understand the attraction of “betting.” It is hard to refuse sympathy to the factory “hand” or clerk who occasionally puts his “shilling” on a horse, going through his weary day’s work with the zest of expectancy and hope afforded by his speculation. It gives him a topic of conversation in the intervals of his work, and is for him a sort of “politics” in leisure hours: into his dull life it introduces an element of romance.

It is, however, impossible to discuss the practical ethics of modern gambling without regarding that factor of pure gambling, which we have analysed, in its actual place as part of a vicious amalgam in a dissipated life.

We have chiefly considered the derationalising influence of the anarchic element of chance which is the nucleus of the process. But, regarded as a mode of transfer of property, gambling involves a union of several anti-social desires. The desire to take unearned gains is, as we have seen, itself immoral, for such gains of necessity imply an injury to some other known or unknown persons, nor in the case of gambling is the damage thus done to the character of a winner mitigated by the knowledge that those from whom he wins have sought similar unearned gains at his expense. In many natures the possibility of such facile gain quickens the latent instinct of avarice, one of the most insidiously disintegrating influences in human society, inviting as it does complete self-absorption and an entire loss of sympathy with the material interests of one’s fellows. The brooding infatuation of the habitual gambler chills human sympathy more certainly than any other practice, inducing not indeed enmity or active animosity so much as a callousness which views the misfortunes of others with placid indifference. It is just this absorption upon selfish ends in reference to incidents fraught with emotional strain that is prone at once to break down the whole fabric of the moral character and to dethrone the reason. For as man is only moral and rational as a being who stands in orderly relation to other similar beings in human society, so a practice based on a virtual denial of this social order is the arch-enemy of human personality: instead of a man we have a self-absorbed emotionalist. “In the making of a bet—a man resolves to repress the use of his reason, his will, his conscience, his affections; only one part of his nature is allowed free play, and that is his emotions.”[1]

The passion of gambling, once settled in a man, seems to take physical root in him and to be almost as difficult to expel as drink, opium, or any other acquired physical vice. In extreme cases, it is often held, gambling tends to absorb all other interests, even swallowing up its associate vices. This, however, is not the normal case. Gambling commonly consorts with drink: gambling-houses are commonly places for the sale of alcoholic liquors, and wherever the law permits, or can be evaded, drink-shops are betting haunts. Professional gamblers are doubtless sober when they ply their craft, for skill and cunning are requisite in most kinds of “mixed” gambling: a broker “cornering” the market, like a bookmaker handling a sudden shift in the odds, or a card-sharper with suspicious dupes, needs to have his wits about him. But it is not as gamblers but as tricksters that these men need to be sober, and as they require sobriety in themselves they desire the opposite in their dupes. Hence, the business of gambling is often done in an atmosphere of alcohol. This is not, indeed, invariably the case. The temperament of some people is so sanguine and so prone to reckless play that no physical stimulant seems necessary. But in Northern European peoples drink is usually necessary to induce that instability of judgment and disregard of the future which are conditions of gambling.

The statistics of crime prove beyond all cavil that gambling is the king’s highway to fraud and theft. This is not merely because it loosens general morality and in particular saps the rationale of property, but because cheating is inseparably associated with most actual modes of gambling. This does not imply that most persons who bet are actually cheats or thieves; but persons who continue to be cheated or robbed, half-conscious of the nature of the operations, are fitting themselves for the other and more profitable part if they are thrown in the way of acquiring a sufficient quantity of evil skill or opportunity. The “honour” of a confirmed gambler, even in high life, is known to be a very hollow commodity, and where there is less to lose in social esteem even this slender substitute for virtue is absent. What percentage of “men who bet” would refuse to utilise a secret tip of a “scratched” favourite or the contents of an illegally disclosed sporting telegram? The barrier between fraud and smartness does not exist for most of them.

Serious investigation of the gambling process discloses the fact that pure gambling does not afford any economic basis of livelihood, save in a few cases where, as at the roulette-table or in a lottery, those who gamble know and willingly accept the chances against them. And even in the case of the roulette-table the profits to the bank come largely from the advantage which a large fund possesses in play against a smaller fund: in the fluctuations of the game the smaller fund which plays against the bank is more likely at some point in the game to be absorbed so as to disable the player from continuing his play. If a man with £1000 were to play “pitch and toss” for sovereigns with a number of men, each of whom carried £10, he must, if they played long, win all their money. So, even where skill and fraud are absent, economic force is a large factor in success.

Since professional gambling in a stockbroker, a croupier, a bookmaker, or any other species, involves some use of superior knowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the “chances” amounts to “loading” the dice, the non-professional gambler necessarily finds himself a loser on any long series of events. These losses are found in fact to be a fruitful cause of crime, especially among men employed in businesses where sums of money belonging to the firm are passing through their hands. It is not difficult for a man who constantly has in his possession considerable funds which he has collected for his employer to persuade himself that a temporary use of these funds, which otherwise lie idle, to help him over a brief emergency, is not an act of real dishonesty. He is commonly right in his plea that he had no direct intention to defraud his employer. He expected to be able to replace the sum before its withdrawal was discovered. But since not only legally but morally a person must be presumed to “intend” that which is a natural or reasonable result of his action, an indirect intention to defraud must be ascribed to him. He is aware that he is acting wrongly, as well as illegally, in using the firm’s money for any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing the quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances extenuating his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it, must be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner or later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet his obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more readily for two reasons. First, there is a genuine probability (not so large, however, as he thinks) that he can replace the money before any “harm is done.” So long as he does replace it, no harm appears to him to have been done: the firm has lost nothing by his action. This narrower circumstance of extenuation is supported by a broader one. The whole theory of modern commercial enterprise involves using other people’s money, getting the advantage of this use for one’s self and paying to the owner as little as one can. A bank or a finance company is entrusted with sums of money belonging to outsiders on condition that when required, or upon agreed notice, they shall be repaid. Any intelligent clerk in such a firm may be well aware that the profits of the firm are earned by a doubly speculative use of this money which belongs to other people: it is employed by the firm in speculative investments which do not essentially differ from betting on the turf, and the cash in hand or other available assets are kept at a minimum on the speculative chance that depositors will not seek to withdraw their money as they are legally entitled to do. In a firm which thus lives by speculating with other people’s money, is it surprising that a clerk should pursue what seems to him substantially the same policy on a smaller scale? It may doubtless be objected that a vital difference exists in the two cases: the investor who puts his money into the hands of a speculative company does so knowingly and for some expected profit; the clerk who speculates with the firm’s money does so secretly, and no possible gain to the firm balances the chance of loss. But even to this objection it is possible to reply that the revelation of modern finance in such cases as the Liberator and the Globe Finance Companies shows that real knowledge of the use to which money will be put cannot be imputed to the investor in such companies, and that, though some gain may possibly accrue to him, such gain is essentially subsidiary to the projects of the promoters and managers of these companies.

It is true that these are not normal types of modern business: they are commonly designated gambling companies, some of them actually criminal in their methods. But they only differ in degree, not in kind, from a very large body of modern businesses, whose operations are so highly speculative, their risks so little understood by the investing public, and their profits apportioned with so little regard to the body of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category. In a word, secret gambling with other people’s money, on the general line of “heads I win, tails you lose,” is so largely prevalent in modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial atmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either not illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor delinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employees are more easily detected and punished.

But, living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other people’s money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a part in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an employee, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation, falls into lax ways of regarding other people’s money, and comes in an hour of emergency to “borrow” the firm’s money. This does not excuse his crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history.

Publicity and education are, of course, the chief instruments for converting illegitimate into legitimate speculation, for changing commercial gambling into commercial foresight. This intelligent movement towards a restoration of discernible order and rationality in business processes, by eliminating “chances” and placing the transfer of property and the earning of industrial gains on a more rational foundation, must, of course, go pari passu with other movements of social and industrial reforms which aim simultaneously at the education of individual personality and the reformation of the economic environment. Every step which places the attainment of property upon a sane rational basis, associating it with proportionate personal productive effort, every step which enables men and women to find orderly interests in work and leisure by gaining opportunities to express themselves in art or play under conditions which stimulate new human wants and supply means of satisfying them, will make for the destruction of gambling.

THE EXTENT OF GAMBLING

By John Hawke

Growth of Betting

The most disquieting feature in the consideration of the state of the country with regard to this habit is its spread among the wage-earning classes. By them it was little practised when it first became systematic in connection with horse-racing among people of better means. Groups of the latter class lost money and fortunes long before the fashion took any general hold of very considerable numbers of the aristocratic and wealthy classes. Betting took place principally at the race meetings. There were grand-stands upon some of the race-courses many years before the close of the eighteenth century, probably the largest being the one at Doncaster, erected in 1779 at a cost of £7000. It was not until ten years later that a regular market for credit betting was established by the institution of Tattersall’s Subscription Rooms; and, that the original purpose of the grand-stand was only for viewing the races, is made clear by the contemporary records. At Ascot Heath, a separate wooden shed had to be used by those who wished to bet. Even as late as 1833, although the Epsom stand was the largest in Europe, the betting market was kept away elsewhere, upon the hill. Six years later, complaints having been made of the betting market being held in the grand-stand at Doncaster, to the annoyance of the spectators, especially ladies, arrangements were decided upon for the future to form an enclosure for betting outside the stand. Similar precautions had previously been taken at Goodwood. Betting was transacted at Newmarket at betting posts, where rings were formed on the heath. Betting was also carried on away from the courses at premises belonging to Tattersall’s in London (which, however, in 1839 consisted merely of a small apartment, with only 300 members on the books), and in the vicinity of the course at the Newmarket Subscription Rooms, where there were only 57 members, other than those belonging to the Jockey Club. There were also special rooms hired at Doncaster, York, and Liverpool for members of either of the above clubs to bet in. A chronicle informs us, in the reign of William the Fourth, that although the number of spectators at Newmarket seldom exceeded 500, mostly of the highest classes, the majority on horseback, the turf was becoming more popular in 1836 and the attendances larger.

It will thus be understood that the general public, for a long time entirely excluded from the privileged betting circle, could only take part in the business by the connivance of some of the professional men having the entrée. In 1849, however, the Newmarket authorities, seeing the feasibility of largely adding to their funds, arranged that a small subscription should confer temporary membership of the Newmarket Rooms. This caused many complaints by the old habitués, and it was found necessary, in view of the dubious standing of some of the new-comers, to modify the credit system, and to insist upon daily settlements. The cash gaming of the race-course indulged in by the great bulk of race-goers was not betting, but was carried on by means of roulette-tables, lotteries, sweepstakes, and other adjuncts of the gambling-booth. The Select Committee of the House of Commons (1844), in reporting against the miscellaneous race-course gambling, clearly did not anticipate that the grand-stands and enclosures would take the place of these other methods, and become sources of great profit as places used for gambling by betting, and that the abolition of booths would merely result in the transfer of the gamblers to the enclosures or rings, as may be seen by the following paragraph from their report:—

Your Committee cannot consider the establishment of gambling-booths on race-courses as in any way an essential accompaniment to racing, and they feel that they cannot too strongly express their opinion that all such practices ought to be entirely and universally discontinued. If there is in any place a real demand for races, money enough is sure to be subscribed for plates and stakes to be run for, and if at any place sufficient sums for these purposes cannot be raised without the aid of gambling-booth rents, the races at such places had much better be left off.

Sixty years have gone by, and race-course proprietors acknowledge that the loss of the present gambling-ring rents, or entrance fees, would put a stop to three-fourths of the race meetings in the kingdom.

Legislative enactments followed the Parliamentary Reports, and to a great extent swept away the miscellaneous gambling, which was only to make way, unhappily, for the more subtle form of turf betting. For years before the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the proprietors of public-houses (or persons in collusion with them), and of specially hired offices in the great towns, had been in the habit of using their premises for the purpose of accepting betting money, and, after a time, relations were established between them and some of the credit-betting professionals belonging to the clubs and subscription rooms. This was how betting by those away from the race-course continued, and even increased in volume, notwithstanding the effect of the Betting House Act in 1853, which, immediate as it was with regard to these betting offices, was partially neutralised by the change of location brought about when the new railways were beginning to convey large numbers at a moderate expense to the course, and by the laying on of the telegraph offering the means to others of rapid communication with the betting men at the race meetings, for gambling purposes, by those unable to make the journey.

The time was one of transition, and legislators appear to have overlooked the fact that the miscellaneous booth gambling having been previously suppressed, their enactment putting an end to ready-money betting establishments, then chiefly in towns, would only result in their virtual transfer to every race-course and so-called club. There had been a great deal of irregular and surreptitious cash betting upon the race-course, but it was not a generally recognised system. It was one that had gradually grown. The bookmaker with a satchel taking money in advance and giving tickets, was unknown on our race-courses in the forties. Later on it was particularly recorded that at the Chester Cup race of 1852, one large bookmaker took a great many £5 notes, and the practice was then coming into fashion. It was, however, to laxity in applying the law that the ready-money, or deposit, system owed its subsequent continuation and increase in volume, for there is no doubt whatever that the Act of 1853 was considered at that time to apply to the evil in race-course enclosures as elsewhere. A recognised contemporary authority wrote: “The fatal facility induced by the open deposit system is nipped in the bud”; and another, “Cash betting stopped upon the passing of the Act.” The temptation, however, to race managers to wink at wholesale infraction of the law was very great. Entrance fees to the enclosures promised to become their financial backbone, and to enable them to add enormously to the value of the stakes and cups. And it was found that to permit ready-money betting was to turn a few score of entrance fees to the rings into thousands. That the practice was even many years afterwards considered illegitimate is shown by the Jockey Club notice in the Racing Calendar of July 23, 1874, and the official notice at Goodwood by the Duke of Richmond, “No ready-money betting will be allowed upon any part of the course or park,” in the Calendar of the same date.

An Account of the Present Increase

Betting

It is not necessary to follow in any detail, beyond this period, the growth of horse-racing, and the practice of betting connected with it which had now become a national foible. The foregoing sketch was desirable for the understanding of the subject, owing to the absence of any other authentic continuous record, and by the fact that the masses of the nation had not become a gambling people as compared with foreign populations, either in other ways or in this, until long after the introduction of the sport. The above review of the past takes us up to the year mentioned (1874), when the failure of a prosecution, owing to the interest or prejudice of the Newmarket magistrates, for permitting ready-money betting in the rings, finally opened the flood-gates of the system, which now, aided by railway, telegraph, and press, spread over the country in an ever-increasing volume, and from tens of thousands of sources in city, town, and village drew its main increment from the money-making and wage-earning classes. Hardly any portion of the country, any section of the population, was free from the blight. The bookmakers multiplied. The wealthy and the idle squandered fortunes on them; the toilers brought their sovereigns and half-crowns in myriads. A large portion of the press battened upon the advertisements of prosperous betting men. Servants of the state in high legal positions, devotees of the race-course, and others of subordinate station, gave decisions as to the construction of the law so framed as to put no check upon the spread of professional betting; and horse-racing became a trade instead of a sport. The enormous money interests honeycombed it with dishonesty. Sometimes owners, and more often trainers, jockeys, touts, and betting men, arranged which horse should win, according to the exigencies of the betting market; and, not unfrequently, poison played its part when it was necessary, from the trade point of view, to prevent an animal from first passing the winning-post. The very atmosphere of the turf was pestiferous; it corrupted everything of it and connected with it. The pretence that it was any longer a noble sport was only countenanced by the fashion of titled people patronising it. The ancient plea as to its improving the breed of horses became a byword as the number of yearling races increased and the length of the courses was reduced. The pregnant sentence in the Report of the old Committee (1844) of the House of Lords was forgotten: “The Committee would consider the advantages of horse-racing more than problematical if they were to be unavoidably purchased by excessive gambling and the vice and misery which it entails.” The streams of small bets swelled into rivers, and the rivers filled an ocean swamping the land. The twenty or so bookmakers of the beginning of the century grew into an army of twenty thousand. Many made fortunes; nearly all made a living. Those who confined their operations to the race-courses might be said to do less harm than those who offered facilities away from the course, only that they usually acted in relation to these latter as the wholesale dealer does for the retailer. One of these retail men who was not given to boasting (Chambers’s Journal, 1898) admitted that his business had a turnover of £250,000. It must be remembered that the individuals in the streets are merely the journeymen of well-to-do bookmakers. During last year, amongst the many thousands of fines for the offence, evidence was given—and there are scores of similar cases—that a lad of 16 was one of several servants of a master bookmaker, who mapped out the district amongst his subordinates.

From unofficial but perfectly reliable sources, hundreds of items of information quite as striking as the above could be given, but they are unnecessary in view of the statements of officials and others made before the Select Committee of the House of Lords (1901-2). Briefly summarised, the evidence showed that the practice of betting had grown to such an extent amongst the working classes that it was quite commonly carried on in factories and workshops by agents of the bookmakers, and outside of them by the street betting men. In speaking of the former method, one of many testimonies was given by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, who said that betting was carried on to an enormous extent in the great workshops there; while an idea of the latter can be obtained from Police Superintendent Shannon’s statement that in Lambeth alone 441 persons had been proceeded against in the previous year, the fines amounting to £2000. The evidence proved also that it was not confined to men, but had spread to women and children; that it caused the neglect of wives and children, disregard for parents, and carelessness and indifference in their occupations, frequently resulting in embezzlement from their employers; that this professional betting was largely responsible for corrupting the police, for turning athletic sports into a trade, and for a general neglect of duty amongst those who indulged in it; that all efforts to cope with it under the existing law had failed to restrict it to any extent, including those of the trade unions, some of which exclude from official positions any one known to be given to betting. Excepting those witnesses who in some way, direct or indirect, were interested in the professional betting business, there was a volume of convincing testimony as to its baneful effects. A former prison chaplain, through whose hands in ten years a hundred thousand persons had passed, said that in one jail a whole wing had been set aside for prisoners in connection with betting, which was now increasing more than ever. Several years subsequently to this a carefully kept unofficial register for Great Britain (which is probably a very imperfect one in the sense of much understating the numbers from the difficulty of compiling a comprehensive list by private effort) showed that in the previous five and a half years no less than 80 cases of suicide, 321 embezzlements, and 191 bankruptcies had appeared upon the records of the Courts owing to professional betting, and it must be pointed out that probably not nearly all the embezzlements resulted in prosecution. The Mayor of Salford, for instance, told an influential meeting at Manchester that he was responsible for the conduct of a large business in which several cases of embezzlements had been discovered, but that in no instance had a prosecution taken place. A continuation of these statistics for the three following years, as quoted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords on May 3, 1904, adds to the significance of the figures by revealing that not only has the evil gone on, but that the embezzlements have increased at the rate of 40 per cent. With regard to the allegation that betting was often pleaded as an untruthful excuse in the Police Courts, the senior Metropolitan Magistrate, who spoke with twenty-five years’ experience, and others averred that this statement had been investigated, and proved to have very little foundation; in the very great majority of cases the magistrates having come to the conclusion that betting was at the root of embezzlements.

Evil consequences, unfortunately, are by no means confined to these immediate victims. Testimony as to the corruption of the police, rendered possible by the large profits of the bookmakers, and the great proportion of defaulting Post Office employees owing their ruin to the betting system, seriously supplemented the main evidence. And the inquiries since set on foot at New Scotland Yard with regard to the Metropolitan Police give a pointed significance to the revelations made. The gigantic monetary interest of the Post Office in the betting system appears in one item of the evidence of Mr. Lamb, the secretary, who said that in the previous September the department had sent 82 telegraphists to the Doncaster race meeting, who dealt with 30,000 private telegrams of persons attending the races, besides 184,000 words of racing news for the press.

Betting used to be chiefly confined to the large centres of population, but almost every town and village is now infected. A Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons, in joining the society organised to deal with the evil, stated that his doing so was owing to finding that it had penetrated to the rustic neighbourhood adjoining his Devonshire home. The strange increase in village telegrams on race days has become very noticeable, and charges of tampering with messages to cheat bookmakers are becoming quite common. Such facts, and others, incline those who have studied the subject to consider that the estimate adopted by Sir Robert Giffen at the last meeting of the British Association, in the Economic Science Section, during a discussion on the nation’s wealth, of £5,000,000 per annum as going into the pockets of bookmakers, is a very conservative one.

As to the condition of the race-courses themselves, from the ruffianism of the professional betting men and their hangers-on, interesting revelations were made before the close of the nineteenth century by the efforts of one of the great London daily newspapers. It is not needful to quote the comments drawn forth by the journals friendly to reform, as those in favour of the institution of the Turf are sufficiently pungent. A few of these will suffice. Thus The Field, August 20, 1898:—

Those unacquainted with race-courses must stand aghast as they read the extraordinary tale of misdoing that is unfolded day by day.... A body of miscreants who are prepared to stop at nothing in the way of violence so long as they attain their object, and care not the least if they leave their victim injured for life, as is sometimes the case. The scum that formerly attended the prize-ring has turned its attention to the most promising substitute.... It depends entirely upon the efficiency and vigilance of the management and those it employs by way of guardians, whether or not the rings are invaded by those who have only to be numerically strong enough to do as they please with the respectable element.

The meeting at Epsom is then criticised, but we must devote our little space to the following, also from The Field:—

The goings-on at Brighton, both on the course and in the town, have reached such a pitch that we have discontinued sending a representative to report the racing. Sad to tell, almost as much justification for such a course exists in connection with Goodwood. This has been the happy hunting-ground of the thief for very many years, but we doubt if matters ever reached the pitch they did this year, the gangs of pickpockets working with such impunity that an inoffensive visitor was bludgeoned on the head actually in the very entrance to Tattersall’s ring. Small wonder, then, when an act like this can be fearlessly perpetrated at an aristocratic gathering like Goodwood, that it should be repeated elsewhere.

Here is an extract from one of the letters which appeared at the time:—

Words fail to convey any idea of the ruffianism, robbers, and welshing which took place at the so-called Grand Stand at Alexandra Park on Saturday last. There were from two to three hundred organised professional welshers, thieves, and bullies, with few exceptions well known to the officials and police and even to an occasional race-goer like myself. Woe to the unfortunate individual who insisted on the payment of a bet—a split skull dealt from behind, a scuffle, and robbery. I have no hesitation in saying that the life of every man and woman in that enclosure was absolutely at the mercy of this organised and desperate gang, and a feeling of fear paralysed the stoutest of us.

There were scores of such public communications. One racing correspondent of a large provincial paper stated that he should never think of going to the course without a revolver in his pocket. Of course the so-called sporting and publicans’ papers tried to make out that these letters were not genuine, or were exaggerated, but without exception they bear on their face evidence of their reality. The writer of these lines, however, ascertained the fact of their genuineness from the editor who published them in one of the largest and oldest of our daily newspapers, which has been by no means otherwise conspicuous in this phase of social reform. We may be allowed to quote the following reflections, which witness to the existence of this ruffianly condition of the Turf, from Mr. George Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Rycroft (1903), pp. 43-44:—

To-day’s newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a spring horse-race. The sight of it fills me with loathing. It brings to my mind that placard I saw at a station in Surrey a year or two ago, advertising certain races in the neighbourhood. Here is the poster as I copied it into my notebook:—

“Engaged by the Executive to ensure order and comfort to the public attending the meeting: 14 detectives (racing), 15 detectives (Scotland Yard), 7 police inspectors, 9 police sergeants, 76 police, and a supernumerary contingent of specially selected men from the Army Reserve and Corps of Commissionaires. The above force will be employed solely for the purpose of maintaining order and excluding bad characters, etc. They will have the assistance also of a strong force of the Surrey Constabulary.”

I remember once when I let fall a remark on the subject of horse-racing among friends chatting together, I was voted “morose.” Is it really morose to object to public gatherings which their own promoters declare to be dangerous for all decent folk? Every one knows that horse-racing is carried on mainly for the delight and profit of fools, ruffians, and thieves. That intelligent men allow themselves to take part in the affair, and defend their conduct by declaring that their presence “maintains the character of a sport essentially noble,” merely shows that intelligence can easily enough divest itself of sense and decency.

For a good insight from a bookmaker’s point of view of the “sport of kings” the reader is referred to Sixty Years on the Turf, by George Hodgman.

Bad as all this is, the continued permission of existence to these scores of peripatetic gambling hells would be an isolated evil were it not inextricably mixed up indirectly with the daily life of the masses of the population, who very seldom or never visit the courses. But these baneful institutions and the gambling clubs are fed by the life-blood of the people, whose hard-earned money flows by the thousand retail conduits of street and factory bookmakers to these gambling marts and clearing houses. It is not only where working men and women gather in numbers, but in the home, amongst domestic servants of both sexes, in the shop, the office, on the journey, in educational establishments, even in the Sunday school and the juvenile social club and class, that betting is discovered. A lady who devotes her life to the young, and lives among them in a poor part of London, says that she has very little difficulty about drink amongst the youths, but hardly dare attack the betting systematically for fear of losing her protégés. She found one lad actually receiving telegrams from France during the Continental racing season.

An alarming development, for those who travel by rail (and who does not?), is disclosed in several cases of signalmen having been found gambling and carrying on bookmakers’ businesses. Any one who, like the writer, has been in a railway collision, will vividly appreciate this. The crunch of the carriages, the awful succeeding moment between life and death, are among the ills that mortality is heir to in modern times, and are borne with more or less philosophy, to some extent perhaps depending upon the preventibility of the cause. But it will be well for railway directors, many of whom provide special facilities for the race-course gamesters all through the summer, to the inconvenience of the ordinary traffic, and wink at the gambling which goes on in their carriages however illegal, to draw the line at signal-boxes being made places under the Act and their signalmen being bookmakers. The conviction recently of a signalman for bookmaking at Knaresborough is by no means a solitary instance. In reporting to the Board of Trade on the North British Railway collision at Lochmill siding, Major Pringle states that just before it occurred there were five persons in the signal-box playing games. There are reasons to fear that there are bookmakers’ agents in many of the large railway stations, carrying on their regular nefarious business with the staffs, and affecting the comfort and safety of the public. As to the race-course ruffians, whose patronage is so carefully nursed, they have been known to descend from race trains and relieve refreshment rooms of the provisions without payment, so that it is now the practice in some places to clear them of their contents before the advent of these traffic-cherished caravans.

There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that such cases as that of the clerk through whom the bookmakers robbed the Liverpool Bank of £170,000 (1901), or of the man who began life as a ready-money bookmaker, married into a titled family, was presented at Court, made a member of fashionable clubs, owned the best race-horse of the year, and ended his society career in his cross-examination in the High Court (1904), are exceptional beyond the fact of their striking notoriety. All sections of society are more or less corrupted by the gambling habits prevalent, and particularly by the professional betting system. It would be interesting to trace how many of the unhappy people figuring in the Divorce Court have been connected with the Turf.

In the Civil Service the evil has spread most seriously in the Post Office and Police departments, but is not confined to them. Information having been sent to the writer of this paper that a clerk in a Government office was using the public stationery and other conveniences to issue betting lists from that office, personal application was made to the principal of the establishment, who investigated the matter, found the allegation to be correct, and promptly put a stop to the proceeding. Upon another occasion it was discovered that two clerks were hired to spend their two-day holiday from Civil Service work by the betting men financially interested in a race meeting, who employed them in taking the entrance money to the rings. Having lost a good deal by dishonest janitors, these shrewd speculators had secured the services of individuals who dared run no risk.

The published opinions of such men as Field-Marshal Sir George White, General Wavell, Lord Charles Beresford, Admiral Rawson, and others bear eloquent testimony to the fact that the militant Services are suffering from the immunity obtained by professional gamesters, owing to the lax application of our existing laws and the need for others. The soldiers returning from South Africa were systematically induced by gamblers to part with their savings; and is it not probable that some of the regrettable incidents during the South African campaign, which the nation had to deplore, arose in part from the time of our officers in peace, if not in war, having been occupied more with betting and gambling than in the study of their profession? Many items of information, both of a private and public nature, are alarmingly suggestive of such considerations. A single instance of the latter may be found space for. One of the witnesses before the Select Committee of the House of Lords was an officer commanding a battalion of the Scots Guards, and he gave evidence of the fact that he was a sort of chairman of a betting committee, the go-between of the Jockey Club and Tattersall’s, upon which he spent a considerable portion of his time, the principal duty apparently being to settle betting squabbles between members of the betting clubs and the professional betting men. If this is not considered infra dig. for the colonel of a crack regiment, what is to be expected of the rank and file? His colleagues upon this important tribunal included, he said, a representative of the Ring and two well-known commission agents, the trade alias for bookmakers. We have no hesitation in saying that the Navy is as badly tainted, not only upon the evidence of officers whom we have mentioned and others, but on information from different sources. It was the painful duty of one in authority some time ago to court-martial a young comrade who had got into the hands of bookmakers, and took £200 to pay his debts from funds which, as orderly officer of the mess, he was able to lay hands upon. He was dismissed the Service and suffered a year’s imprisonment. In 1904 Rear-Admiral Henderson, Superintendent of Devonport Dockyard, discovered that betting was being systematically carried on, and published an order notifying the discharge of a skilled labourer of nineteen years’ service.

Professional betting is not confined to horse-racing. Lists are habitually issued in connection with other sports, particularly football. It is gambling which causes the rush for the football editions of the halfpenny journals, and, notwithstanding the efforts made by some of its principal patrons, leading officials of the football world have been found taking part in the disreputable gambling arrangements of sporting newspapers. There are numerous instances in athletics, such as foot-racing, of the proceedings being reduced to a farce by the bookmakers, who controlled the runners; and more than one serious accident on the cycle track has been caused by the efforts of one or more competitors to obey the roping orders from their masters in the ring without arousing the suspicions of the public spectators.

Gambling

Cards

In miscellaneous gambling, cards, harmless in themselves, are still prominent. The game of Bridge amongst the wealthier classes is responsible for reproducing many of the vicious situations we read of in the chronicles of our forefathers. While Queen Victoria was lying dead, one very prominent female society leader could not be got to abstain from this form of gambling even for a brief space. At the aristocratic mansion over which she presides guests must play. One young man of moderate income suggested that his means were quite unequal to such hazards as the hostess and her friends were accustomed to, but he was given to understand that he could play or leave. He unhappily chose the former alternative, and in a few hours lost half-a-year’s income. There are hundreds of smaller imitators of this woman, whose husband ranks high in the political world. The disgusting position is frequently created of young girls, not discouraged from gambling by their parents, losing money which they have difficulty in paying to men with whom they are not otherwise well acquainted. In speaking to a young lady who moves in society circles, and on inquiring with due diffidence as to her knowledge of gambling among the friends of her family, she said, without the slightest hesitation, “Oh, every one we know gambles.” One of the speakers at the council meeting of a ladies’ association, of which Lady Trevelyan is president, said that a society lady, on a friend observing that £150 a year seemed a small allowance for her daughter, replied that the latter was such a good Bridge player that she easily made £1000 a year.

Amongst the poor, where horse-race betting does not prevail, cards, to which juveniles are largely taking, as well as automatic machine gambling, are often made the vehicle for disposing of their small means.

The Stock and Produce Exchanges

A very large proportion of the business done upon the Stock Exchange is nothing else than gambling. No stock passes. It is merely gambling in the rise or fall for differences. Here, as elsewhere, neglect, for which the whole nation is to blame, has allowed matters to get into a groove, and great difficulty will be found in getting out of it. In another chapter suggestions are made, and if the proposed remedy is necessarily a serious one for those whose business is to a great extent founded upon an illegitimate basis, some of them at least feel that the present system is indefensible, and the following pathetic extracts from a letter written by a member of a leading Stock Exchange firm merely express the conscientious misgivings of the best class of men there—misgivings which are more or less shared by all but the hardened gamblers of the establishment:—

The evils of speculation, in common with many more fellows here, I much deplore; but at the same time, when three-fourths of the business is of that nature, what is the alternative to most Stock Exchange men? Either starvation or gaining a livelihood by means which one’s conscience tells you to be wrong; and human nature is not proof against the temptation. That is the naked truth, not to mince matters; and God knows it is an awful fact, to those who give any thought to these things. I am perfectly certain that the majority of Stock Exchange men loathe the business, and would be glad to get out of it. The subject is never absent from my mind. I have felt in a great strait over it for years. God grant that I may get out of it somehow; but how, He only knows. It seems queer to write like this to a stranger, but you have struck such a chord of sympathy that it is a relief to unbosom one’s mind.

The above remarks also apply to the produce and metal exchanges. The misery caused in Lancashire and elsewhere by American gamblers cornering the cotton market is calling the attention of merchants to this branch of the subject, and with a little goodwill on the part of the Governments concerned there should be no insuperable difficulty in framing regulations which will greatly hamper, if not destroy, the possibility in future of such proceedings.

Condition of the Country

Thus in England, at the commencement of the twentieth century, the world of society, commerce, finance, and athletic sport is saturated with gambling, more or less veiled or entirely open. Individual and family ruin from it in all classes is frequent; and there are thousands of cases stopping short of this, but entailing, besides material loss and suffering, the lowering of the moral and mental nature, thus affecting the intellectual and religious fibre of the people. But the evil to the nation does not stop here. Until lately, at all events, the highest Courts of Law, as well as the lower ones, did not escape the indirect taint, and even now politicians and office-holders, who would be ostracised in Japan, continue to allow themselves, and very often their households, to be deeply involved in gambling transactions in their homes, their clubs, and with low practitioners of the race-course ring, their children in numberless cases copying the evil habit. A young heir to a peerage, a candidate for a seat in Parliament, whose father is considered to be a great political light and would wish it to be supposed that he is not without reforming zeal, although fencing with the question of the betting ring, boasted to a companion of his sudden acquisition of £2000, laughing at the idea of having worked for it, and explained that it came from the bookmakers at one meeting. The public services are corrupted, particularly the Police and the Post Office, the latter institution rendering many unnecessary services to the gambling system, in the profits of which it largely shares, and not making the special efforts which we see in the United States and elsewhere to hamper professional gambling. The nation as a whole is, it may be hoped, too healthy in a moral sense to allow a further continuance of this social plague without a great effort to grapple with it; but the bitter experience of the nineteenth century demonstrates how futile it would be to rely solely, or even to any great extent, upon the unaided attempts of educational persuasion to root it out. These, indeed, must not be relaxed, they must be increased and multiplied, and should be supplemented by more extensive and systematic endeavours, aiming at improved conditions of life for the poor, and further amelioration of health, and opportunities for recreation; but betting and gambling should also be made, as they can be made, by amended and better applied legal regulations, far less profitable, and more difficult, dangerous, and disgraceful, whether for the rich or the needy. There need be no real interference with the liberty of the subject; for that liberty, regarded in a true light, should not confer any licence to trade upon the ignorance, weakness, or folly of others, which is the characteristic of all gamesters, and not least of those belonging to the professional betting system.

STOCK EXCHANGE GAMBLING

By A. J. Wilson

Nothing is easier than to heap abuse upon the Stock Exchange and to place to its debit every crime of which the gambler can be guilty. And all the abuse would have a sediment of truth beneath it, for infinite are the evils that have grown up and spread their roots far and wide through all strata of modern society since the day when dealing in stocks and shares first became a passion or a habit. True as this is, and numberless as may be the demoralising consequences of indulgence in the habit of stock and share “bulling” and “bearing,” it would be none the less false and unjust to lay upon Stock Exchanges and their members all, or even half, the blame for the moral undermining of society that may ensue from subjection to the hazards of the play. In many of its functions the Stock Exchange has always done admirable service to civilised mankind, and the great majority of the members of all such institutions are men as upright, as humane and high-principled as could be found among any body of merchants in the world. It is not their fault but often their misfortune that the spirit of unbridled lust after unearned wealth should so continually strive for the mastery and so often become dominant in their business.

From the point of view, however, of the highest ideal of national morality, it is unquestionable that the trade of the stockbroker is of tainted origin. In this country the business began in an organised sense when William III. founded the National Debt and called the Bank of England into existence to furnish him easily with the means to carry on his Continental wars; and an evil day surely it was for the peace of the world, for the progress of mankind and civilisation, for the masses of those who toiled in all countries endowed with a settled form of government, when national debts were invented—debts laid upon the shoulders of the people without either the intelligent or deliberate sanction of those called upon to bear the load, or adequate estimate of the consequences in any direction.

We must, however, in most things take the world as we find it, and in spite of my hatred of all debts, and of my belief that debt never paid off in the long run ruins the debtor, whether individual or state, it has to be admitted that good of many kinds came out of evil in this instance. Debt, by the intermediary of the banker, begat credit; and credit, based upon a security which was reliable, the fruits of a nation’s labour and enterprise, gave an irresistible impetus to that industrial and mercantile expansion which has carried the prosperity of the United Kingdom to heights never before seen on earth, and changed the course of human progress everywhere. Imagine what might have happened if the banker’s utilitarian fiction, which treated the symbols or book entries of moneys spent in wars as so much realised wealth, capable of being utilised to call still more wealth into existence, had never been allowed to have free play. The nation would have perished beneath the dead weight of its obligations. Called upon to find the interests of the debts imposed upon it, out of resources suffering continual depletion, unstimulated by any new capital beyond what the minority might or might not have been able to furnish at the moment out of its savings, it would have sunk lower and lower in poverty, until its condition might have become one of hopeless anarchy.

The banker and the stock-jobber between them saved England from that fate—unconsciously, perhaps, but they none the less saved it. Their operations often exhibited a kind of inverted, topsy-turvy communism. Gravely treating the promises to pay emitted by governments of all degrees of irresponsibility as the inviolable obligations of the people at large, they used these promises and symbols of wealth already dissipated as the bases on which to rest further credits granted to joint-stock enterprises—to South Sea bubbles no doubt, but also to East India companies, Hudson Bay companies, mining companies, canal companies, adventures of all kinds, some of which outlived the manias amid which they came into existence, and survive in one form or another to this hour. Throughout modern history, the part played by debt in engendering credit, in calling capital into existence as it were out of nothing, and providing the means to carry out great undertakings by whose completion alone could the credit-born capital become living and real, has been such as to transform the world, girdle and seam it with railways, bind it together by electric cables, and cover its oceans with ships almost as sure and safe in their comings and goings as a suburban railway train. In ways almost infinite, credit was created to represent assets not yet in being; and, by putting in pawn of previously existing debts, and through the intermediary of banks, it drew out hoards from the keeping of the thrifty. Dead capital—capital spent—came to life again as it were, and was a potent agent for the advancement of mankind in civilisation. By this means modern nations not only stimulated their manufacturing industries, awoke and encouraged inventiveness, spread their productions over the whole world, but developed cities at home and made life bearable for aggregates of population whose healthy existence would have been impossible under the conditions prevalent, say, at the close of the Napoleonic wars and for long after.

Many other forces doubtless were at work so far as England alone is concerned—wealth drawn from India, the tireless energy of the race, the backwardness of other nations—but it was in no small measure the impetus supplied by those portions of our otherwise intolerable National Debt, utilised as a means of creating credit through our banks, that the resources and energies of the nation, and such forces as it drew from the yearly accretions of its savings, the ever-increasing fruition of its accomplished enterprises, were given full scope. In this development the Stock Exchange played a leading part. Without it as intermediary, little progress could have been made. Human nature rather than the share market must therefore be blamed for the manias and delirious gambling by which every step in the triumph of man over the forces of nature, of time and space, has been accompanied. The younger generation does not remember the days of the railway mania, when men went demented over wild and hopeless-looking projects, and rushed worthless shares to fantastic premiums in the height of the disease; but amid that insanity the warp and woof of our present network of roads came into being. There were enormous losses inflicted upon the multitude by the collapse, the always inevitable collapse; but good work was none the less done, progress made. Again, I may say, had the masses of mankind been capable of obeying high ideals, all this could have been avoided. It is possible to conceive a state governed by a spirit of mutual help and wholesome brotherliness in citizenship, wherein all would have been united according to their means to build these new iron highways for the good of the whole community, not for private gain; but it is vanity to think thoughts like these, men being what they are. The one effective force that could be relied on to attract the necessary capital to any enterprise is cupidity in one degree or another, the desire for individual profit. It may be the restrained and wholesome acquisitiveness of the man who merely seeks a safe repository for the fruits of his thrift, but more often it is the greed which cherishes the desire and hope of excessive and untoiled-for profit.

A subject full of temptation to the student of human passions is provided by the history of Stock Exchange furores, but I cannot pursue it. I will only cite some characteristics as ground for suggestions towards the abatement of admitted evils. Their eradication, I fear, is beyond hope until the spirit of mankind changes and its ideals. Certain characteristics stand out prominently to distinguish Stock Exchange gambling of the present day from that prevalent before the first Limited Liability Act, that of 1862, came into force. Previous to that date gambling in stocks had been confined to a limited class of the wealthy, whether aristocratic or professional—to the narrow, plutocratic classes and their immediate flunkies and hangers-on; but after the Limited Liability Act of 1862 gave definite form to this kind of joint-stock enterprise and enlarged the field of operations, speculation gradually became the fashion with classes of people hitherto unfamiliar with it, and the fascinations of the play attracted wider and ever-widening circles of society. After 1870 education came to the help of the share manufacturer, and by and by the financial newspaper, the professional tipster, the “bucket-shop” agencies outside the Stock Exchange, conducted with the avowed purpose of guiding the play so as to bring wealth to the gamblers, exercised their malign influence. Then came the £1 share, fully paid up, with no further liability, as the most attractive speculative instrument of them all. When I first knew the City, more than thirty years ago, no joint-stock undertaking whose projectors wished to be thought respectable could have been launched with a capital composed of £1 shares, whereas now very few companies of any sort are constructed on any more substantial-looking foundation. Mines, even gold-mines, in the early days of limited liability were rarely launched as joint-stock undertakings with shares of merely £1 nominal value. Nowadays, shares of 5s. nominal value are not uncommon in the case of such companies, and a few months ago the shares of several prosperous Indian gold-mines were subdivided into half-crown units, really in order to facilitate market dealings, i.e. gambling, in them over a wider field.

By the aid of the £1 share, all manner of enterprises have during the last fifteen years, or since 1890, been converted into joint-stock companies on the basis of an excessive capitalisation that would have been impossible to the same extent under the old fashion of the £10, £20, £50, or £100 share; and the losses consequent upon the unprincipled rapacity of the promoter, gratified by means of this ensnaring instrument of speculation, have been greater and more widespread than those inflicted upon an easily deluded public by all other forms of joint-stock swindling put together. When the new fashion was just coming into favour, one of the shrewdest members of the Stock Exchange, a broker of high character, predicted to me that it would be so. Talking of railway manias, shipping manias, and the losses they have caused, he remarked that they were “trifles to what the public is going to suffer through the £1 share.” Not many years after this opinion was expressed to me, the nation plunged into the South African gold and diamond mine dementia, with results not yet by any means fully visible, but whose harvest of loss and affliction has already transcended in magnitude and in the numbers of the victims all the plagues of this sort that have preceded it.

It looks so easy for the “small man,” as the City slang would put it, to have his “little fling” with a £1 share. Even when such share rises to five, ten, or twenty times its nominal value, it still seems easy, tempts the multitude more perhaps than when it may be at a discount, and there are such facilities for indulgence in the passion to make money without effort, with “no risk at all,” as the bucket-shop puffer is ever iterating. The market gives every facility, is ready to lend its means to the player, to smooth the field for him at the start. He need not pay for the shares he buys. The dealer and broker will “carry” them for him fortnight after fortnight, as each market “settlement” comes round, lending the money at handsome rates of interest, and charging an infinitesimal commission, or, perhaps, no commission at all, for performing this necessary operation. A man possessed of £50 may in this way be induced to speculate in £500 or £1000 worth of these small shares, staking his all. If the buyer wins, as in seasons of fever he often for a time does, the heavy interest he is charged does not affect him. Each fortnight, as the Stock Exchange account comes round, he pockets his “difference,” the sum left over as product of the advance in price after all charges have been met, and thinks himself on the high road to affluence. Initial success inflames the appetite, fresh purchases are made, probably before the earlier speculations are closed, and while the profits already reaped by the earlier gambles are being spent as fast as received. By and by reaction comes, losses accrue, expressed in “differences” to be paid instead of received, and the end is usually misery for years, for a lifetime, or sudden and irretrievable ruin. Slowly, and amid infinite suffering, this harvest of the South African, the Kaffir market insanity is now being reaped, as that of more than one Australasian and American rage of speculative abandon has been again and again during the present generation.

Is the disease thus indicated incurable—a disease whose course is invariable, whose end is profit, wealth perhaps, to one in a quarter of a million among the players, and to all the others various gradations of loss, from a few pounds disbursed in exchange for wisdom-fraught experience to complete ruin and social degradation? Yes, I believe it to be incurable, especially in a society constructed with such all-pervading artificiality as ours. One’s first impulse is to cast unmitigated censure upon the gambler; but that also would be unjust. The motives of mankind are mixed always, and at the beginning the impulse which starts the speculator in shares on his downward course is oftener than not at least half laudable, is at the worst the product of a man’s surroundings, of the vanities of life by which he may be lured. Constituted, moreover, as the social economy of modern England is, the great bulk of our fellow-citizens have no assured foothold in the land of their birth. They toil without hope, and see only privation or absolute want at the end of the day’s work—be it long, be it short. Essentially we are a nation of nomads, uprooted from the soil, and with no assured hold on the means of existence, speaking of the mass, beyond what the weekly wage or yearly salary furnishes. What more natural, one may say inevitable, than that this divorcement should generate in a vigorous race a hunger after security, a craving for some refuge, some shield against the uncertainties of existence, a way of escape, perhaps, from the irksomeness of individual surroundings, the tyranny of a hard taskmaster, the caprices of employers, whose power over all beneath them is too often almost that of life and death. By their surroundings, by the circumscribed horizon of their life, the minds of many men are prepared for the tempter who comes to them with the promise of deliverance by means of a successful gamble on the Stock Exchange. Others, again, are moved merely by vanity, by false standards of social wellbeing, by jealous emulation of those who may seem richer than they are, for is not the possession of money our one standard of “wealth” and wellbeing? To all such, once the plunge is taken, degeneration comes. A habit is established, and may become a craze, a passion, a lust that in time will devour all that is best in the heart and intellect.

Such seems to me a fair summary of the psychology of gambling, and I do not see how its ravages are to be stayed, the disease eliminated from society, without radical changes in its structure implying loss of privilege and an abatement of class selfishness by the few who now stand apart, the nation’s drones and hive-harriers, or without the cultivation of higher ideals than those implied in mere purse-proud social emulation. And of one thing I am sure; the London Stock Exchange can do little or nothing to check the ravages of this social canker, nothing effectual can be done in any Stock Exchange of them all. To expect bodies of men, associated together for purposes of gain, in the conduct of their daily business to lay down self-denying rules for their conduct, is not merely unwise but futile. The more the organised groups of stock-jobbers and brokers doing business at particular centres called Stock Exchanges hemmed themselves in by restrictions established with a view to limit the facilities for play, for buying and selling, the more such business would be thrown into the hands of irresponsible outsiders, most, if not all, of whom are mere vultures and cormorants, devourers of the substance of all who fall into their hands. In a very real sense the saying is just that the less restricted, within well-regulated limits, the constituted market may be the greater is the safety of the public from fraud and loss. Often when the London Stock Exchange, by far the most powerful and best organised institution of the kind in the world, has attempted to bar the way to the mere speculator in certain directions it has been defeated. It refused many years ago to sanction dealings before allotment, that is to say, purchases and sales of a security before it was really in the hands of the market or the public. The dealings went on all the same, until the liberty had to be restored. Unto this hour many members of the “House,” as the Stock Exchange is affectionately called by its members, set their faces against gambling in “options”—against, that is, the system of play by which a speculator puts down so much money, parts with it for good, in exchange for the right to “call” for the delivery, or to give delivery, of a certain specified amount of a particular security—to “put,” the slang is—on a certain future day at a price fixed when the transaction is entered into. But this kind of pure betting business grows every year all the same, and is now of a magnitude an Act of Parliament could hardly do much to lessen. Against the force of human passions no Stock Exchange can hope to war with success, and I do not believe that any such body should be asked to impose self-denying ordinances upon itself, the only effect of which would be to drive the business away from it into channels more fertile still in ruin.

But if there is no root and branch remedy, there must be some palliatives. It ought to be possible to restrain and diminish the ravages of the share manufacturer and professional market thief, at the same time that the range of temptation was narrowed for the multitude. It should be possible to do this, and with goodwill something might be done even by the Stock Exchange. Take as example the habit now prevalent of introducing new securities of all kinds on the market without the preliminary of a prospectus. This habit has received a great stimulus from the latest attempts at company law reform, in virtue of which the liability of directors for statements in prospectus has been sensibly increased. To escape that risk, new companies are now launched without preliminary statements of any sort. Certain members of the Stock Exchange, acting in concert with the schemers outside by whom they are employed, begin to buy and sell shares in an undertaking whose very name may be until that moment unknown everywhere, and about which neither market nor public has any information whatever. By arrangements with the financial press, whose charges for such services are most remunerative, quotations representing these unreal sales and purchases are daily and weekly paraded before the public, often accompanied by vague general statements regarding the wonderful wealth this particular share represents. Attracted in this way, the ignorant presently begin to itch to take a hand in the game, and gradually, if times are favourable and what the contemptuous broker calls the “fool public” is “on the feed,” quite a lively market arises, whose end is the stripping of the outsiders by those who laid the snare. The end of the fraud comes afterwards, when the plotters have got safely away with their plunder. All that the public may have left is worthless shares. Dozens, one may say scores, of African and other swindles of this sort have been perpetrated during recent times of excitement, and now and then the Stock Exchange itself has been cheated. Surely it ought to require no great amount of self-denial on the part of this body to stop peremptorily all impostures conceived and carried out after this fashion. It need only refuse to grant a settlement of bargains in any share thus foisted upon the public until the whole of the facts relating to it are laid before its committee, and quotations in the official list ought never to be granted to any company until the whole facts regarding it have been properly laid before the public. In other words, I think nothing but good could arise even to the market were the Stock Exchange to enact a rule forbidding the introduction of any security on its floor by the members until full information had been published by those responsible for its inception, whether by prospectus or by properly authenticated and signed declarations.

Another reform within the power of the Stock Exchange that might do much good would be the prevention of dealings in shares that represent goodwill, and therefore, as a rule, merely the plunder of promoters. Often, as it is, vendors’ shares are not “good delivery” until after a certain time has elapsed. If this irregular and capricious usage, dependent really upon the action of those who found the company, were to be made an invariable rule, and if such shares were kept out of the play altogether until a reserve had been gathered against them to give them substantial value, one fertile cause of loss would be reduced to small proportions. The plunderings of the Cecil Rhodeses, Whitaker Wrights, Hooleys, and the like would in this way be circumscribed, although by no means stopped. Unhappily, as I hold, the mischief cannot be entirely stopped until the spirit of the nation changes.

Once the habit of “bulling” and “bearing”—of buying more than one can pay for or of selling what one does not possess—lays hold of a man, the disease is too often incurable. When the victim suffers loss—gets caught by the market, as he would put it—he doubtless suffers more or less acute mental agony according to his character, the traditions of honourable conduct he may possess, or the extent of his risk. Then his mood becomes that of the old rhyme: “When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.” Vows are registered never more to be caught in this snare; the mind is prey to remorse, and virtue is honoured. But let the danger pass, the threatened loss become a profit, and all is forgotten when next temptation comes. The player resumes the game, and, on a “tip” from some interested source, sells a “bear,” in the hope of robbing the unknown counter player through a fall in the price that will enable him to buy back at a profit and pocket the difference drawn out of such counter player’s resources. Or he buys a “bull” to effect the same purpose when a rise on the market shows a profit. Morally, I may say, there is not an atom of difference in the character of these two operations, unless it be found in the fact that the “bear,” the speculative seller, is on the average a man of wider intelligence than the “bull.” To the public and the market he is also by much the more valuable gambling animal of the two, because in proportion as a speculative account is oversold is the capacity of a market strengthened to resist shocks from bad news. The publication of such bad news becomes the signal for those who have sold what they do not possess to rush into the market and repurchase. This operation often causes prices to advance on bad news, and always steadies the market against disturbing influences, to the great benefit of the real holder, who is thus enabled to sell at a smaller loss than would otherwise be possible. Bad news on an over-bought account—on a market, that is, where the great majority of the players are holding securities for the rise on borrowed money—always brings disaster. From this point of view, the “bear” is much more useful to the genuine investor than his opponent; but morally there is nothing to choose, so far as the individual operator is concerned, between the two methods of speculating.

“Bulling” and “bearing,” it may be said, constitute the daily business of a large proportion of dealers, wholesale merchants in the Stock Exchange, and for them it is legitimate enough to sell according to their judgment what they have not got and buy what they could not out of their own means pay for. It is in their power to cut their losses always when such begin to accrue, and many amongst them close the day with their books “even.” That is to say, they have neither a “bull nor a bear open,” to use the market phrase. They are mere traders, whose judgment of the market tendencies guides them in taking the one course or the other for the day only. It is altogether different, however, for the outsider, the man amongst the public, whether he resides in the City, or at Land’s End, or in Connemara. Such cannot operate with rapidity, and usually act upon tips and prepossessions, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred prove fatal to their peace of mind and injurious to their pocket.

Is it, then, impossible to induce the multitude amongst the people to abandon this method of hunting after wealth without labour, for that is our only hope? A change in the spirit of the people, a higher sense of self-respect, a deeper regard for the community of interests which would lead a man to treat his neighbour as a man to be helped, not injured, would do more to put an end to this modern habit than any number of rules and regulations. It has been suggested that gambling could be almost entirely put an end to were sellers of shares to be compelled to hand in the name of the possessor, or the numbers of bonds where bonds are sold. Undoubtedly this would stop every kind of free-handed gambling, except by way of options; but could any such regulation be established that would apply to the irresponsible dealings of the outside gambler through bucket-shops? I think not. Moreover, any such regulation would in the long run be injurious to genuine holders of securities. Take the example of Bank shares. It is almost forgotten nowadays that, as a consequence of the banking panic of 1866, an Act, known as Leeman’s Act, from the name of the man by whom it was introduced and carried through Parliament, effectually stopped speculative dealing in Bank shares. These are now consequently exclusively an investment security. They cannot be sold without giving the numbers of the shares and the name of the holder out of whose possession the shares are to come. There is consequently never any “bear” account, that is to say, any account open in unspecified shares sold for the fall, in Bank shares, and unquestionably this immunity from attack has been most valuable in checking Bank scares when credit has become strained. But what would happen supposing a crisis arose through the failure of one or two important Banks? Would it be possible for frightened shareholders to escape their liability and sell out before the crisis became acute? No, it would not. The shares would simply be unsaleable on any terms; there would be no market for them at all, and each individual holder would be compelled to face his loss without chance of escape. From a moral point of view this may be all right—I am not objecting—but undoubtedly the acuteness of the disaster would be concentrated to a cruel and most ruinous extent upon the then existing groups of Bank shareholders.

Recently, when a panic threatened in Russian securities upon the Paris Bourse, the official brokers there notified to the outside market that they would not record sales of the bonds unless the numbers thereof were handed in with the order. This at once stopped speculative selling, but I doubt whether the consequence was not to weaken the market and to render the credit of Russia suspect amongst the multitude who, speculatively or otherwise, held this particular national debt. At any rate, the rule was very soon abandoned, and dealings resumed on the old footing. In Germany a number of restrictions and vexatious taxes have been placed upon Bourse transactions, especially those of a speculative kind, without increasing the health of the market or really diminishing the amount of gambling done. The business is transferred to other markets, very largely to London—that is all.

Again, it may be said that the English Government put an end to one form of gambling, still prevalent on the Continent, with complete success. Lotteries were put down by Act of Parliament, and the trade of the lottery-ticket jobber summarily stopped. That is true enough, but there is no analogy between a step of this kind and stopping gambling in actually existing securities. If lottery loans themselves had not been discontinued, it would have been impossible for any Government to stop the pernicious dealing in lottery tickets. If we could stop all issues of securities, wipe off the National Debt, Municipal debts, the intolerable burdens of Colonial debts, and turn all joint-stock undertakings into communistic organisations, there would be an end of Stock Exchange gambling, at least in any form now familiar to the public; but short of that I do not see how the legislature can interfere with effect without creating other, and perhaps worse, evils than those it sought to abolish. An example of legislative powerlessness has been furnished by recent efforts at joint-stock company law amendment. The Act of 1900, which was going to do so much to purify the atmosphere and limit the ravages of the unscrupulous promoter and his “front page” guinea-pigs, has really increased the mischief, as I have already pointed out. Gambling might be diminished were the State to increase the taxes upon speculative transactions, although I am doubtful; but any such increase would rather tend to emphasise the absurdity of the Gaming Acts. Through these Acts it is possible now for any speculator to repudiate his obligations, and cases frequently arise in the Law Courts where losses are in this way repudiated.

Possibly the law might be able to put down outside speculative agencies, which do an incalculable amount of mischief, and yet even there difficulties stand in the way. Are newspapers to be forbidden to insert the advertisements of these “bucket-shops”? Will the Post Office refuse to transmit their circulars? How far is it legitimate or safe, let alone wise, for the State to interfere in order to protect the fool from the consequences of his own folly? I cannot solve the problem; it perplexes me much and often, but the longer I think things over the less am I inclined to invoke the aid of the State in order to put an end to this social canker.

The remedy must come, I repeat, from the people themselves: from better instruction, from healthier views of what constitutes true success and respectability. There is an emulation in extravagance which has spread widely through all classes of society during the past two generations, and has now culminated in a vicious recklessness that does more to whet the appetite for gambling of all kinds than anything else. This spirit is not perhaps so visible in the country village, at the rural parsonage, or among the petty tradesmen in a small country town as elsewhere; not so patent to the eyes of the onlooker. We do not need to go so far: society in the West End of London is quite sufficient for illustration. The habits there have grown in extravagance within my time to a degree almost impossible to realise; and most people embraced in this word “society,” as well as thousands who are pressing to get within the magic circle, live beyond their means, struggle to eke out their inadequate incomes—inadequate through the standard set up by gambling on the Stock Exchange, often by ruining themselves.

Why cannot people exercise some moral restraint, or at least a trifle of common-sense? No system of gambling in existence treats the public with absolute fair play. The sharper is everywhere, but far less frequently in evidence on the Stock Exchange than anywhere else. It is none the less true that the mere charges of the market constitute a considerable handicap against the outside player. Supposing a man is induced to buy a security, the price of which at the date of his purchase is £1000. According to the character of that security, he will pay from 25s. to £5 to the broker he employs to carry through the transaction. This charge is really a very small payment for the work done—would be quite inadequate payment at its highest, did the market transact investment business alone. That money, however, is so much out of pocket at the start to be set against expected profit. Then there is what is called the jobber’s “turn.” The wholesale dealer in the market has always two prices. He buys at one price and sells at another, the difference being his immediate limit of profit. Assume such difference to be merely half-a-crown per cent, and the stock bought will cost the outside buyer 50s. more than he could have sold it at when the transaction was entered into. Say £5 altogether is thus against the outside buyer on the deal at the start. The security purchased will therefore have to rise 5s. per cent before he can get home, as the phrase is, without loss. If the profit, however, does not come along within a fortnight or thereby, arrangements have to be made to carry the transaction forward to a new account, as it is called. This involves interest on the money, which cannot, on an average, be less than 5 per cent per annum, or roughly another 50s. per fortnightly account. In addition, there is probably a small charge, representing £1 or 25s., made by the broker for arranging the fictitious purchase and sale by means of which this continuation of the bargain is effected. Let a speculative purchase be carried on in this way for a few months, and it will become evident to everybody that a very considerable rise must occur before the purchaser is able to sell at a profit after meeting all charges. In three months he may be £20 to £25 to the bad, assuming the price to remain where it was when he bought. If people would reflect in this way, and make calculations before they plunged into a gambling transaction of the sort, they would surely often hold their hands.

With sales for the fall—sales of what a man does not possess—it is often very much worse, especially if a man has sold a share or stock on which dividends accrue from time to time. He may be saved the cost of interest on money lent to him, but has to pay the dividend upon the stock he sold each time that one is declared; and should selling for the fall have been large enough to exceed the supply of shares available for lending purposes, he may be called upon to pay a fine for failing to deliver what he sold, and each fortnight the carry-over charges have to be deducted from the price at which he sold, together with dividends when they come, and fines for non-delivery when the “bear” is more or less “cornered.” In this way it often arises that a man will not come out with a profit, even should he round off his speculative sale by repurchasing 10 per cent below the price he originally sold at. I give these brief illustrations to help the outside mind, to warn people off from this method of trying to make money, but my hopes are not profound that they will have much effect. We shall require a world-enveloping credit cataclysm to lift mankind out of its present vicious ruts on to a higher, a more altruistic moral platform.

GAMBLING AMONG WOMEN

By J. M. Hogge, M.A.

Betting has so long been associated with men that it is probable there are still many people who have never considered the evil in its relation to women. The attention of those, however, who have given some thought to the problem of betting and gambling has been increasingly turned to this phase of the question, and it is now certain that among women the practice is spreading with alarming rapidity. As in the case of men, the habit is not confined to any one class of society but has affected all, so that at the one end of the social scale costly jewellery is sold to cover bridge debts and at the other blankets are pawned to put money on a horse.

If we turn to the evidence given before the Lords Commission we find numerous side references to the practice. Here, for instance, is some evidence given by Chief Constable Peacock of Manchester:—

Q. One of these slips (i.e. bookmakers’ slips) you have given me is from a lady?

A. Yes.

Q. And it appears that she had 8s. on in one day?

A. Yes.

Q. In what position in life would she be?

A. She is only a working man’s wife.

Q. She puts in this slip with 8s., meaning that she has invested that money on horses in one day?

A. Yes.

Again, Mr. Horace Smith, a well-known London magistrate, in his evidence refers to the practice of bookmakers taking bets from women and children, and also to the effect betting has on the honesty of women, giving instances to prove his assertions. Asked if he thought that women as well as men bet more than they used to, he replied that he had no doubt they did, and that he had even had women bookmakers before him. Mr. Spruce, a Leeds commission agent, also admitted the fact of the woman bookmaker.

This last statement may come as a surprise to many readers, but we are able to give circumstantial proof of its truth in the following circular:—

Gentlemen in quest of reliable racing intelligence are invited to communicate with Miss ——. Only those who are prepared to pay well need apply, as Miss —— is not one of those who give away Tips.

During the latter part of 1903 Flat Racing Season Miss —— decided to commence business as a racing adviser, and she at once met with conspicuous success, her selections including—Grey Tick, Cesarewitch; Burses, 2nd Cambridgeshire; Switch Cap, Manchester November Handicap.

Miss —— invites all sportsmen in quest of genuine racing intelligence to join her list of regular wire subscribers. Satisfaction guaranteed to all regular subscribers.

Those sportsmen who send for her wires can rely on winning money. Her terms are, she believes, higher than those of the ordinary Turf correspondent, but clients will be fully satisfied that her wires are worth every penny charged. Those sportsmen who require wires every day are requested to apply elsewhere, as Miss —— cannot promise to send out more than two or three selections every week. The source of her intelligence cannot be divulged, but it may be mentioned that no other racing adviser is in the same position as Miss —— to obtain such genuine information.

This lady charges 10s. for a single wire and £5 for twenty.

Mr. Luke Sharp, the Official Receiver for Birmingham, Worcester, and West Bromwich, replying to the Bishop of Hereford, drew attention to perhaps the most deplorable phase of betting among women. This consists in the collection of bets by agents calling on women for other weekly payments. Here is what Mr. Sharp said:—

I had a conversation with one of my friends who is very much interested in these matters with regard to some cases in Worcestershire, and I wanted to get the particulars, as I did not like to make a statement unless I could prove it, and I will now read you his letter if your Lordship desire it. He says: “I do not mention this in any way to incriminate the man who I understand is carrying on a system of gambling, much as I condemn such and consider it should be stopped. I simply brought the matter before you to show how among the many ways gambling is brought to the houses of the working classes. It is done by agents who, while collecting the weekly payments on some article purchased, also collect for the master who makes a book, and so induce the women to place money on any race taking place in any part of the kingdom. I consider something should be done to put a stop to such.” That is about the worst kind of gambling that I ever heard of.

Along with this evidence we must also take that of Mr. Robert Knight, General Secretary of the Boilermakers’ Society, and a magistrate of Newcastle, who says:—

Betting generally is largely on the increase; especially is this noticeable amongst young men and women. Between the hours of 11.55 and 3.15 a bookmaker was recently seen to take 236 bets from men, women, and children in South Shields.... Unrestrained by Act of Parliament, the bookmakers go from door to door in the streets occupied by the working classes for the purpose of inducing women to bet.... When the workmen are at their work these bookmakers go round and visit the parts where they live, get hold of the wives of the workmen when the husband is at work, and get them to bet. Very often it does not end in betting with spare money: a woman very often takes the things of the house and pawns them to get the money to bet with.

There is still another reference to this practice in Mr. Knight’s evidence, which we give in full:—

Q. With regard to the house-to-house betting, would you include that in the prohibition (i.e. of street betting)?

A. I would. I think it has become a terrible evil—one of the worst I know of.

Q. Do these bookmakers solicit the women or whoever opens the door to them?

A. Yes; they go from house to house, and they get the women, in the absence of their husbands, to bet, and I have known in some cases where the money has been so short that the mother has gone and taken some things out of the house and pawned them in order to get money to bet with.

Q. Have you known of bad cases of women betting with their husbands’ money, for example?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know many cases of that kind?

A. Very many. In some cases the husband is not himself given to betting, but on account of the visit of the bookmaker to the house during the husband’s absence at work the wife has given way to betting; and then by-and-bye the husband has got to know that this has taken place, and I need not tell you the result: it is extremely sad.

It will be agreed that this form of betting is particularly mean and despicable, even if it be true to some extent that women when they gamble are specially addicted to it. Indeed Mr. Tannett-Walker, who is connected with a large engineering works near Leeds, gave it as his opinion, in his evidence before the Commission, that they were “worse gamblers than men,” and he went on to say:—

I think it is more serious, because, generally speaking, the working man only bets with his pocket-money, as he calls it in the working districts, and I think the woman very often risks the money the husband gives her for household purposes; I think she is much more reckless and excitable under loss than a man, and therefore much more likely to go to the full extreme of all the money she has in her pocket.

The present writer has had the privilege of receiving a large mass of evidence from clergymen, the police, prison chaplains, officers of the S.P.C.C., police court missionaries, district nurses, and others, bearing on the prevalence of the habit, and it may be valuable to supplement with outside testimony what has already been quoted from the Select Commission on Betting and Gambling.

The Vicar of Jarrow-on-Tyne writes:—

My impression is that it is on the increase, but it is not easy to tell. For the most part, it takes the form of lotteries or sweepstakes, women putting in their sixpences, etc., and winning a possible £20 or so. Now and then a woman may be seen openly betting in the streets, but usually it is done quietly. I have been told that women act as agents for the bookmakers. Now and then a woman will come to her Communion whom I suspect of betting, but, as a rule, I think they feel it on their conscience more than people of the upper classes do.

The police court missionary at Newcastle-on-Tyne says:—

I have had considerable experience of evangelistic work in slum parishes in Newcastle, and it is my opinion, from careful observation, that there is a very great amount of betting and gambling among women. I have known women sell the shoes and stockings from off their children’s feet to get coppers to put on their favourite horse.

From a pit village the vicar’s wife writes:—

The women are so terribly tempted by the men who come round to their doors.

But possibly the following story, related by a navvy, may serve better than numerous examples to exhibit the real inwardness of the betting habit when it attacks the home through the housewife:—

I have my health and strength [he said], and I have always plenty of work; the job I’m on now will last another six months. It’s true I have seven children, but I make no trouble of working for their support. We used to go to church when we was first married, my wife and I; we lived at Southampton then, and we both thought a deal of Canon Wilberforce. It was him that tied the knot. Since we came North I have not gone to any church: wife was taken up with the children. But I always washed myself, and put on my Sunday suit when Sunday came round; sometimes I’d take the kids for a bit of a walk into the country, and sometimes I’d take a stroll round with a few of my mates. Anyways I held up my head straight and thought I was as good as any—my meaning is that I thought I had the right to look any one in the face, for I believed till a week ago that I did not owe any one a penny piece. It was Saturday even, and up comes to me a bailiff chap, but I did not know then that he was a bailiff; he shoves a paper into my hand, and I reads on it “Judgment Summons. Personally served on the Defendant,” and there below I sees my name written in. I said, “Take it away, I never have aught to do with such things.” I had to take it in, and I found it was an order for £1: 2: 3, that should have been paid long before to a firm called a “Clothing Company,” trading from a town twenty miles away. Not half a dozen words did I say to any one that day, just sits dumb and dazed over the fire; not a wink did I sleep, but by Sunday morn breakfast was over I’d my plans made.

I gets a bit of lead pencil from one of the lads, turns the children out of the room, spreads out a piece of paper, and sits myself down. Then I says to the wife, “My lass, I never have chastised thee, never; but now thou hast just got to bring me every bill and every pawn-ticket, and thou hast just got to think on, and to tell me of every penny I owe, and if I find thou hast kept aught back, I shall feel fit to take off my belt and to thrash thee with it to within an inch of thy life, and if I have to go to gaol for it, I’ll go.”

By tea-time that Sunday I’d got that paper about covered with figures, and reckoned up it come to £70. There were two doctors’ bills, four coal-cart men, there were three lots of goods from the “Clothing Company,” and four from the “Furnishing Company,” and both these I were told firms of peddling fellows whom I had never seen, because they are such curs they never show their face at a door when the master’s in, and when they have sold their goods (all on the weekly payment system) to silly women, they go off home by train, so as the husbands can’t follow them home and give them the horsewhipping they deserve.

I found a deal of things that Lord’s Day. I went up to look at the children’s beds and saw the blankets was gone off them, I looks in the drawers and found them empty where they should have been full of children’s clothing and bedding. I understood that day why the two eldest girls were so long getting themselves places; they had naught but what they stood up in. Folks might say I should have looked into things a bit sooner, but I were one that always said, “If the man earned the money and turned it over to the wife, it were the wife’s place to lay it out to advantage.”

We had not been living in that house above a twelvemonth, but it all come about since we’d moved in. I could see nothing wrong with the street when we took the house; it looked quiet enough. It had not been built so long; the house was clean and airy, and there was an extra room for the lads, that were the chiefest thing we moved for.

How was I to know, when nobody telled me, that the women in this was all a-cheating their husbands, and was just one a bigger gambler than another.

As near as I can make out their practices was like this. They’d all back horses with the money they should have kept in a safe place against rent day, and them that lost would wait while Monday when the packman come round, and they’d take a suit of clothes or a pair of blankets on the weekly payment system. Straight away they would carry them to the pawn-shop, so their husbands having never set eyes on the stuff would never miss it out of the house. I suppose they’d think they’d done a clever thing when they had raised the money for the rent and a bit over besides to back another horse.

Sometimes the Day of Judgment would seem to have come to one or another when county court summonses would come to their house, but so long as their husbands did not see the papers, they’d put off the day of reckoning a bit longer.

My wife says they’d run round to one another’s houses and say, “I’m in a deal of trouble, will you oblige me to-day by taking a pair of blankets off the Clothing Company and pledge them for me, and I’ll pay you back when I can? And if you get into trouble some day, I’ll help you out if you’ll just oblige me this once.” My wife knew nothing about such ways afore we came to live in this street, but she were a quick learner, and got into it like a lad gets into his new sums when he gets put up a standard at school.

It’s none so very hard when it’s put plain—horses, packman, pawn-shop, and a county court; and then over again, more horses, more packmen, more pawn-shops, and more county court.

Sorry to trouble you with such a long yarn, but I put it to you as a practical question, How am I to get out of this fix? If I go to gaol I lose my work, and rent’s running on, and grocery bills and coal bills are running on, for seven bairns can’t be fed on air, and I am told going to gaol does not clear off the whole of the bill to these pedlar fellows, but only a little bit of the back payments, and you may be taken again as soon as you come out for another bit. I put it to you plain, What is a man in my circumstances to do?

Faced with a similar question, what would the reader do? Circumstances like these indicate only too clearly why it is that there is a social problem. The heart of all happiness and integrity in life resides in the home, and when anything comes between the mutual understanding and confidence that alone makes home life possible, we may be sure that evils undreamt of before will find an entrance into the home.

The insidious nature of the evil is best illustrated from the fact that almost every week the newspapers record the downfall of some individual whom the public had thought above suspicion. Similar instances occur in the humbler walks of life. The present writer knows of instances in which cottages sometimes lent for religious services were also on occasion used as betting centres. Here is an extract from the letter of a reliable correspondent:—

A bookmaker made one woman in a street his friend. She would receive the money for him, and gradually entice many to join. In my own district there the most respectable looking home was used in this way. The owner, a widow woman, was perfectly clean and tidy, no gossip, and never talking at the door. She allowed her son first, and then she herself took it up, and just because in all other ways she was respectable, the other women were snared into thinking less of the sin.

Another feature which calls for comment is the fact that girls are either encouraged by their employers, or by their fellow-servants, to indulge in betting. Deaconess Clarkson of Durham mentions the case of a girl, sent to service from a “Friendless Girls’ Home,” failing to repay her monthly instalment for her outfit. On being asked the reason, the girl maintained that her mistress had persuaded her to put it on a horse.

This other instance would be ludicrous if it were not pathetic. The first night a young girl spent in service she was asked by the butler to give half-a-crown for the sweep. She asked why she should pay the sweep! but in order to avoid giving offence gave him the money. The parlour-maid “lifted” the sweep, amounting to 37s. 6d., when the girl understood what the butler had meant.

We saw from the evidence of Mr. Luke Sharp that this evil was not confined to the North, and it might be well to draw attention to a reference to similar practices elsewhere. Writing in the Nineteenth Century recently, a writer said:—

A typical Lancashire woman of the lower class told me that trade was very bad in her district, mostly because the women bet a shilling on nearly every race, and they take th’ bread out of th’ children’s mouths to obtain the shillings. That was a thing unknown in Lancashire fifteen years ago, as it was also for women to be seen drinking in the public-houses; and half-a-dozen fellow-travellers in the same carriage all confirmed her statement.

It might be interesting to give the actual figures for one instance in which a cottage in a working-class district in York was carefully watched for some fourteen hours, spread over five days. Those entering to make bets were as follows:—

It will readily be seen that a very significant proportion of those entering the cottage were women, boys, or girls.

So far we have dealt almost entirely with the prevalence of the practice among working women, and that for obvious reasons. In other classes of society there is, of course, as much betting on horses as among working women, and for larger amounts. In other ways, too, there is very much to be deplored. Dean Lefroy, speaking in Norwich Cathedral in June of 1904, created quite a sensation by a strong denunciation of bridge gambling. The condemnation elicited some facts, all proving the prevalence of the evil.

No more mean or despicable an outrage of the ordinary canons of hospitality can be conceived, than that so well illustrated in an extract from a recent address by Ian Maclaren:—

I want [he said] from this place to offer my protest against bridge parties, which are gathered together simply and solely not for playing a game but for winning money by gambling. Conceive of one case, and I only mention one. A young married lady is asked to go and stay in a country house by a lady older than herself, and an old friend of the family. Her husband cannot go with her, but she goes down to spend the week-end. Bridge is played, and, although she knows a little about it, she excuses herself as not being a sufficiently good player. It is pointed out that every one must play, and that no doubt she will do well enough. She has a suspicion that not only money is risked on the game, but that it is risked to a considerable amount. She is assured that it is nothing. At the close of the evening she discovers that she has lost £35. Of course far greater sums than that are lost, but that is a great deal for a young married lady, the wife of a professional man, to lose. She has not the money to pay. She goes home, and very properly tells her husband the whole story. He sends a cheque to the hostess, and he states distinctly in the letter that a woman who would ask a woman younger than herself, and specially under her charge, to play at bridge under such circumstances was doing nothing more or less than keeping a gambling-house.... I ask you whether you would like your wife to be involved in this vortex of gambling, and if you are prepared to face not the financial but the moral consequences?... I hope this appeal will lead you to consider the position, and take a firm stand against an insidious because a very fascinating and fashionable evil.

The incident referred to is no uncommon experience, and reveals feelings alien to the fine spirit of hospitality so common to British life, and incidentally exhibits the blighting effect of the greed of money upon the life of society.

The gaming-house proper is a more sordid consideration, which is only mentioned to show that its existence has not been forgotten. More often than not it is managed by a woman, and the police raids reveal over and over again that such houses are the very sink of crime and vice.

From what has been written it will be seen that the evil has spread very insidiously into all ranks of society. The working woman gambles with the wage of her husband, the society woman with her dress allowance or her husband’s income, the spinster with stocks and shares through her lawyer, and the honestly intentioned though ill-advised charitable lady with raffle tickets at church bazaars. By refusing to participate in those lotteries women have one very obvious way of discountenancing an immoral method of raising money.

Remedial measures for the evil are suggested in another article in this book, but we would draw attention to one other remedy which would scotch the evil among women, viz. a resuscitation of the ideals of home life. “The home,” said the late Mr. Moody, “was founded before the Church, and you in Britain stand more in need of homes than you do of churches.” The failure of home is the failure of the parents to realise its duties and its responsibilities. And the failure to recognise these is traceable to the failure to recognise the value of a home religion. There is no home problem where there is true religion, and there is no power which keeps more alive the best qualities of human kind. Without it there can be neither that affection nor respect which makes it possible for the children of the home to remain attached to it, and every child induced by the example at home to take up the practice of betting is a disintegrating factor in that happiness which alone can bring stability and respect to character. This article will not have been written in vain if it helps in any way to reinvigorate and refresh the home ideal.

CRIME AND GAMBLING

By Canon Horsley

When I jot down in 1905 my impressions and observations as regards betting (chiefly on horse races) as one of the causes of various forms of crime, and of the type of character that thinks little of crime, and readily commits it on the lightest temptation or provocation, I am at first surprised to see how little mention there is of it in a book entitled Jottings from Jail that I published in 1887, after ten years’ experience in Clerkenwell Prison. The moral I draw is not that I ignored it amongst the many causes of criminality and of crime, nor that I considered it unimportant in comparison with the far more common cause—that is intemperance; but rather that the evil has been increasing by leaps and bounds since that decade, beginning in 1876, which I spent in prison as a young student of criminology. Nor indeed is there so much as might be expected in my later book Prisons and Provinces, although therein, when enumerating “ten desirable reforms” that stood out clearly in my retrospect, I find the following passage:—

5. The censorship of the press in the matter of publication of the unnecessary and corrupting details of divorce proceedings and suicides and of betting lists. Editors cannot be the moral prophets of the age while they keep a sporting prophet and while in bondage to advertisers and the lowest classes of their readers. Some crime is State-caused, much is paper-caused.

“Crime is condensed beer,” occurred to me as a dictum for which there was far too much justification; but “Crime is the fruit of betting,” neither seemed to me then, nor seems to me now, a tenable adage.

And yet how painfully the directness of the path from betting to bondage, from Epsom to the Old Bailey, was brought before me each month for those ten years. Before each session of the Central Criminal Court a procession of young postmen for trial, and destined in those days almost inevitably to penal servitude for their first crime, showed how good character, fair education, constant and honourable employment, and sobriety, had all been inoperative against the temptation to steal letters containing money. And why the theft? In almost every case it was that they had been led into betting on horse-races, had lost, and had been pressed for the money by the bookmakers under threats of exposure. This was an ever-recurring object-lesson on crime as a product of betting, but the most striking instance I recall was when three Chief Inspectors of Scotland Yard—Bishops in their profession—were charged and sentenced in consequence of their having allowed themselves to be drawn under the influence of some Turf criminals of the most dangerous type. Then indeed one thought, If those things are done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If these experienced men of the world, with professional knowledge of the tricks of the hangers-on of the Turf, can be drawn into the vortex, what can we expect of the average silly and ill-paid clerk, who has some excuse for his feverish desire to add to his inadequate income, though at the expense of others? And telegraph clerks again became prisoners through their special temptations. The straight tip for which a shilling had been paid passed through their hands and added them gratuitously to the ranks of the cognoscenti. Then later in the day came from the same Turf agent the straighter tip to the smaller circle of artisans and shopmen who had paid half-a-crown, and later still the straightest tip to the innermost circle of his customers who had paid ten shillings. Not all clerks would have sense and integrity enough not to think that here was a road to fortune made for them by the expert knowledge of some and the credulity of others. So too, after Derby Day, amongst the various crimes—pocket-picking, burglary, assaults, embezzlements—that kept dropping in after and in consequence of that day, attempts at suicide found their place. The first case that meets my eye in some old prison notes is: “Barman, 22, lost place for giving drink away; lost his savings (£80) at betting on horse-races; therefore ‘had the miserables’ and attempted suicide.” So a London coroner, interviewed on the subject of an epidemic of suicide, said: “I always look for suicides after the Derby. After that event you always find that a certain number of shop-assistants have absconded, and a number of other people have committed suicide. They belong to a class of people—much too numerous nowadays—who want to get money without working for it. They fail, and then they go and jump into the river, or something of that sort. You will always find some suicides after Derby Week.” And it should be remembered that not only in London, but all over the world, does Derby Day represent the acme of interest and of temptation, and produce the maximum of evil sequelæ. And, again, it struck me forcibly that betting produced one of the most hopeless types of prisoner with which a prison chaplain could have to deal. The men habitually on the Turf seemed to be the very incarnation of cunning and suspicion and selfishness. They had one prayer and one creed: “Give me this day my brother’s daily bread,” and “Do everybody, and take care they don’t do you.”

What I have said will show that I was not, nor could be, ignorant of the existence of the vice as one of the chief causes of crime during the ten years, 1876-1886, when I was daily conversing with prisoners. But from all I have seen, read, and heard since, and not least from conferences with present-day prison officials, I am convinced that betting has so largely increased of late years that its effects are much more obvious in prison. I had many sad cases of the ruin of those who were dependent entirely on character for employment, but had lost that character through the embezzlement that betting losses had prompted. But when in 1902 I, as one of the Committee appointed by the Rochester Diocesan Conference to investigate the question, had before me one of our Metropolitan police magistrates, to whose court come almost exclusively the labouring and the shop-tending classes, he made deliberately the very strong statement that, of recent years, he had hardly ever had a case of embezzlement before him which was not connected, either directly or au fond, with betting. Nor would he admit that this plea of betting was merely an excuse put forward without real cause. On the contrary, careful inquiry into the cases proved conclusively that the plea was a true one. And to the same Committee Mr. Hawke stated that the House of Lords’ Commission by evidence proved conclusively that a large proportion of the embezzlement of the country was due to betting with bookmakers and to professional betting. And here are a few typical cases that came close together in point of time. The first was the notorious one of the quiet bank clerk Goudie, who embezzled £170,000. He had got into the hands of bookmakers, and they had compelled him to go on by threats of exposure, after the common practice of their kind. The next is that of a labourer’s wife, charged with attempting suicide and stealing shoes. She had pledged them to endeavour to recover money lost on horse-races. The police constable seized the poison intended for herself and her children. Her husband was not aware of her betting. The third is that of a caretaker of a chapel near me, who had stolen £60 in bank notes, and set up the plea that he had got them at the Alexandra Park and the Epsom Races. Next comes a clerk who obtained fifteen guineas by a forged telegram. When only seventeen he made the acquaintance of a bookmaker who would continue business with him in spite of his father’s remonstrances. The judge commented on the fact that it was this same bookmaker whom he had now cheated, and by whom he was prosecuted and got twelve months’ hard labour. The next is a dispenser who embezzled £11 from the doctor who employed him. His downfall was accounted for by betting, and his solicitor offered to give the names of the bookmakers with whom he had been betting, in consequence of whose threats of exposure he had stolen to pay them. Another clerk embezzled £1. In his absence from the office the manager’s suspicions were aroused by a street loafer bringing a betting account for the clerk showing a large amount owing. He lost fifteen years’ good character, and got three months’ hard labour. And next comes a postman who, in the words of the Recorder, “had been engaged in a systematic robbery of the public service in order to engage in transactions on the Turf.” He got six months, but in my time would almost certainly have had five years’ penal servitude, as such offences on the part of postal officials were dealt with then with uniform severity. Had one to labour the point, a press-cutting agency would enable one to fill pages with typical cases arising in any week, especially during what is called the flat-racing season, when, as a friend of mine engaged on a London evening paper tells me, the circulation was found on inquiry to increase by 50,000 per diem from the time of the Lincoln Handicap. The Lords’ Committee were told by Sir A. de Rutzen, after twenty-five years’ experience of the crime of London, that “more mischief was brought about by betting than by almost any other cause, especially street betting, which could very well be put down.... From personal knowledge, he could say that the evil arising from betting was as deep-seated as it was possible to be. In cases were persons were prosecuted for embezzlement and betting was mentioned as the cause, he was in the habit of making inquiries, which invariably confirmed the statements.” Another Metropolitan magistrate deplored that he entirely concurred with what Sir Albert had said, and added that where the crime had been one of fraud or embezzlement he had invariably found that betting had been at the bottom of it. Bankruptcy may be a misfortune, but is very frequently a social crime, and on this I would only refer to the evidence given before the Lords by Mr. Luke Sharp, Official Receiver for Birmingham, as to betting as a cause of bankruptcy, and would remark that, carrying my mind back over a series of years, I cannot remember a case of the bankruptcy of a trader known personally to me in which either drink or betting, and commonly both conjoined, was not the cause, although either or both were often unsuspected until the crash came.

I may add, although facts and figures are here more difficult—and, indeed, largely impossible to produce—that my fourteen years’ experience as a Metropolitan Guardian of the Poor, during ten of which I have been Chairman of a workhouse containing over 1300 inmates, is that betting now stands only next to intemperance amongst males as a cause of pauperism. The habit cannot be eradicated even in old age and the seclusion of an infirm ward, and bets are made in surreptitious pence when the larger sums and more frequent opportunities of yore are impossible. The fascination of drunkenness, which is decreasing, is great: that of betting, which is increasing by leaps and bounds, is greater. The evil effects of intemperance are to some extent confined to the individual; those of betting are rarely so confined.

THE DELUDED SPORTSMAN

By A Bookmaker

So very much public attention has recently been called to betting, more particularly as applied to and in connection with horse-racing and the backing of horses, that I thought I would sit down and write a little of my experiences in respect thereto and give my unprejudiced views upon the subject. Yes!—an old bookmaker’s views—illustrated by facts and circumstances; bearing in mind that, as I believe, this is the first instance of a bookie’s confession of the “game,” and so is, I suppose, a novelty.

I am penning these few lines just as the matter comes across my mind and without any attempt at literary or even logical merit—a plain, unvarnished life-tale, as it were—and in so doing I hope to point out certain means that might improve the Turf business and free it from the fearful odium it is now in; and secondly—and let me say my main and principal reason for rushing into print is for the benefit of and a guide to small backers. By “small backers” I mean those who go in the cheap enclosures at race meetings, and more particularly I mean stay-at-home backers (or let me call them, as they would wish to be designated, “small sportsmen”), who make bets on horse-racing from say two or three shillings to a few pounds daily and habitually. The large backers can take care of themselves, but my advice equally applies to them, and they would do well to follow it.

I am getting an old man, and have been a betting man and bookmaker all my life, so to speak. My parents were poor people, but respectable. I had a National School education. When I was about twelve years of age I was turned out in the world as an errand-boy at 1s. 6d. a week in a general warehouse. I stayed there for a number of years, until at nineteen years of age I was a full-blown warehouseman earning £1 per week! I was a sharp, intelligent young fellow, kept my eyes and ears open, which, I can tell you, I have done all my life (you need to as a bookie, I can tell), and I soon made up my mind that the quid a week in a stuffy warehouse, long hours, hard work, and little prospect of “going ahead,” would not suit me. A lot of my chums used to “horse-race,” “put a bit on,” “get up sweepstakes,” and go to a race meeting now and again. In this way I was first introduced to a race-course, and was successful in winning a bit now and then, but as sure as faith losing it again, and more too. My first impression of a race meeting was a very bad one, for I could see that it was a vast assembly of “wrong uns” to the backbones—thieves, sharps, pickpockets, lowest of the low ruffians and scoundrels—my opinion is but little better of the present race meetings. My brother bookies would endorse my candid opinion, I am sure. The race meetings of the present time, of course, are far superior in comfort and convenience to the old meetings, but the same villainy and cheating is ever rampant; but let us call it now “refined rascality.”

Well, I was wide enough awake to soon see that “backing” was no good, but that bookmaker was the “game.” I soon found a way to start with a pal similarly inclined in views. I wasn’t going to stick at a quid a week when I could see ten times that sum easily to be made. At that time bookies were allowed to rig up in any costume they liked, so we had red waistcoats, white plush hats, blue and green parti-coloured coats, etc. etc.

I was soon “at home” at the “game.” I was sharp and cautious, with but little capital, so, for a time, our rule was “small bets only.” Lor! how the coin came in! seldom did we have a losing day. Well! to sum up my many years of experience, money has ever since rolled in. I have long since been in a position to take any bet you like, from half a sov. to thousands, “with pleasure,” and “thank you.” Money soon became no object to me, nor is it now. How comes it thus? One answer only. Because betting is a one-sided game, and is almost wholly against the backer. Thus the “bookmaker,” be he a ready-money bookie on the course or a S.P. bookie at home, is as certain in the long run to “cop” the backer’s coin as I am writing this. To be sure, the bookie attending the meetings can control his liabilities to a certain extent, which a starting-price bookmaker cannot do; but really it matters little—the bookmakers get the cash in the long run. Let me say that I am referring to substantial well-known bookmakers, and not to the crowd of penniless welshers who infest every race meeting held.

I am writing, as I have said, more particularly for the benefit of backers; they can adopt my advice or not, as they please. Now listen. I have attended every race meeting held in the land over and over again. I am as well known in sporting circles as any man could possibly be known, from the highest in the land to the lowliest, so to speak; my betting transactions amount to thousands and thousands—I really cannot say how much. I am known, and properly so, as a very wealthy man—money is nothing to me—and let me candidly and truthfully tell you that I have never known a backer of horses to permanently succeed. The backer is successful so long as his money, pluck, and luck lasts, or until ruin has overtaken him. He wins and loses—wins and loses. He is up and then down—up and down. Hope! hope! hope! prompts him to go on; and he goes on. He diligently studies all kinds of plans and systems; he also fools his money away with “tipsters,” who have been described as a set of race-course harpies; every system, all of them of course, certain and sure. He tries “1st favourites,” “2nd favourites,” “1st and 2nd favourites,” “newspaper tips,” “newspaper naps,” “jockey’s mounts,” and numbers of other plans and systems—some his own particular fancy, and some other people’s. He gluts over sporting news, and talks of owners, trainers, and jockeys in a most familiar style, as though they were his own personal friends! He becomes acquainted with horses’ names and pedigrees, and eventually his mind is so full of Turf matters that business, his occupation, and employment become of second importance; he sacrifices home, comfort, occupation, and money—all! all! all! What for? In the hope of easily making money, but in the end for the benefit of the bookmakers. My experience is not an isolated one, but truthfully is that of every well-known bookmaker on the Turf.

Betting is a fascinating vice, and it is perfectly astounding to what an enormous extent it is rooted throughout the land. In every town, village, hamlet, warehouse, office, and workshop in the kingdom you will find the “backer” in thousands and thousands, all losing money—all in the net of the bookmaker. Can you blame the bookmaker for carrying on his money-making business? Why, every one’s answer is “Certainly not!”

Were the race meetings always to be held at the same place, the bookies’ business would practically be “all up.” For why? The local backers would soon all be “played out.” The very fact that the race meetings are changed daily and are miles and miles apart is a veritable god-send to the bookmaker, the trainer, the jockey, the owner, and the dozens of others depending for existence on Turf matters. We thus get daily hundreds, nay thousands, of new faces and fresh backers full of excitement and hope, having “splendid tips” and “certainties,” all ready and anxious to invest their cash with us, but, alas! the majority of whom go home with long faces and empty pockets, whilst the bookmaker and the “betting brigade” leave the scene of action with renewed energy, high glee, and above all cash ammunition for a fresh attack at another rendezvous.

This glorious state of things goes on day by day and year by year, particularly during the flat-racing season. Now, I think it is a bad week if during flat racing I do not clear a hundred or so per day on the average. Some days, but really very few indeed, I make a loss, but on other days the coin rolls in all round, and the average is as I have stated. I have made as much as £5000 in one day! How is that, eh? I am wise enough, of course, to make my book to win, not to lose. Still, with heaps of money in hand, with property here and there—with everything in abundance that I and mine may require or could possibly wish for—with grand country and town houses, with horses, carriages, every possible luxury, every wish and desire gratified, living up to the greatest state of expensive excitement every day (the bookie’s very existence compels a constant round of amusement and excitement or we are nowhere), still, mind you, I am not happy—sometimes far from it. Conscience will make itself heard. True! true! age is telling on me as even it is telling on many another bookie, and we cannot stifle the thought that the grave is in sight, and our last race will soon be run. Often and often am I troubled with thoughts of the past—memory will assert itself—and the questions arise:—Have I led a fair and upright life? Have I got my money and living in an upright, honourable manner? Have I not helped to ruin hundreds of good silly fellows? Visions of them crop up from time to time; I think of them with any but pleasant feelings. How many poor foolish backers whose money I have taken—taken as a business, of course—have lost homes, business, and all; whose wives and children have been turned into the streets through the father’s passion for betting? How many of them have found their way to gaol through betting, and how many have sought self-destruction?

Such must be the occasional thoughts of all old bookmakers. And for why? Because there is not one of us, past and present, who has not over and over again obtained our money by questionable means, even if our inclination was not to do so. We have been, and are compelled—yes, compelled!—to participate in trickery and deceit to the detriment of the backer; and so crops up the thought that the backers’ money in many instances is not obtained honourably. These facts make one feel uneasy. What does this mean? Why, I have in my time secretly paid away much money as contributions to effect certain ends favourable to the bookmaker and to the loss of the backers.

The “freemasonry” amongst certain people connected with racing matters is very strong indeed. Pray let me be very plain in making myself clear. I do not for a moment cast a slur upon or raise the slightest suspicion upon the host of honourable men of high position and standing whose names are identified with Turf matters. Certainly not; the reader’s own common-sense and knowledge must be exercised. But amongst certain actors at race meetings my accusation is levied. Indignantly denied! Of course it will be. We are all upright and honest until discovered to be otherwise. It is the being discovered that is so galling. I could relate to you most startling facts upon these points—incredible, you would say; scandalous, wholly unbelievable! Yet, my friends, true, true indeed! My mouth, however, is so far absolutely sealed. Think yourself how very easy such things could be arranged, and you will cease to marvel. Consider for a moment that all the principal actors at a race meeting are all personally known to each other—old chums, old acquaintances, travelling the country together and enjoying themselves, and you will fail to discredit the fact, viz. that it is so extremely easy to (as it is now termed) “engineer a great coup.”

What is the real meaning of this pretty modern expression? Why, in plain language, it is arranging “to win a race.” Listen! What think you? There are very many unfairly run horse-races. Take this statement as gospel from one who knows, but who cannot divulge the secrets of the Turf. Listen again. Betting is simply a speculative business, two parties to a bet. Each tries to win the other’s money, and each party adopts the best expedient to do so. We all know who does win in the long run, and I am penning this rigmarole to show, if possible, to the small sportsman that the odds against him are so tremendous that it is next to impossible for him to win—I mean in the long run—and I so write in the hope of inducing him to “turn the game up” once and for ever, which I am sure would save much frightful distress, save the wrecking of many a home, prevent much trouble, and would be to the happiness of thousands who now waste their hard-earned money in a wilful way and in impossible successful speculation.

I am not writing as a moralist or a sentimentalist, but in a purely business way; using common-sense to prove to misguided, foolish people that to invest their money in backing horses is a stupid, unwise, unbusiness-like mode of investing their cash, and is a way that means absolute loss, if not ruin, simply because the chances to win are so great against them, and the odds against them so fearful, that success is next to impossible. To convince a backer that such is the case, I know, is a most difficult task, and really for a bookmaker to do so seems a paradox and a right-down absurdity, but it is not so. If the small backer could be extinguished, the legitimate abused business of betting would be much relieved from the stigma now cast upon it through the misdoings of the small backer, who, in his hopeless task, runs himself into serious difficulties and causes trouble all round. The removal of the small sportsman would be of inestimable benefit, not only to himself (I want him to look at the matter in that light), but to the straight respectable bookmaker.

Now with regard to the monied or larger sportsman. He it is who is the friend of the bookie—the dear delightful investor whom the bookie so much loves—the regular attendant in Tattersall’s enclosures and in the members’ rings. Well, well, he can afford to lose, and is capable of taking care of himself. The bookie does not wish to lose him—oh dear no, certainly not; so he encourages him all he can; he makes him presents of nice morocco pocket-books, splendid purses, nicely bound S.P. diaries, Christmas and New Year remembrances in various ways, treats him whenever an opportunity occurs, and loves and plays with him whenever he can. Very many of these beloved sportsmen are men who have made money in trade or business—they are either in business still or are retired—who, having saved a competency to live upon, somehow or other find their way, one after the other, on to the race-course; they nearly always come into Tattersall’s at the different meetings; they go the round of them, and travel gaily from place to place; they get charmed with the free and open life and excitement. They decide, as a rule, firstly, to risk so many hundreds, but when it is gone they generally manage to find more money. Hope! hope! These gentlemen sportsmen talk about their wins but not their losses. Eventually, as usual, they “do it (their money) all in,” then they drop out one by one through want of money and, less often, through being wise in time to prevent absolute ruin. So we miss their dear delightful faces, but we keep their money.

We, the bookies, talk to each other about our said customers and friends. “What about So-and-So—oh, he’s a retired draper. Mr. So-and-So—oh, he’s a market gardener, got a fine business. Mr. So-and-So—the retired grocer. Mr. So-and-So—what, the solicitor? Dr. So-and-So—oh yes, the doctor. Mr. So-and-So—yes, the chemist,” and so forth; then we always laugh, and the oft-reiterated remark takes place, “Yes, he is doing it (his money) all in” (losing it).

We laugh ha! ha! We laugh ho! ho! We laugh at their folly and pain.

One by one we miss them, but sure as fate others turn up from time to time, and so the merry game goes on day by day, month by month, and year by year. Yes, the monied sportsman, the retired tradesman, the successful business man combining trade with Turf speculation. Yes, yes, let them be—they can take care of themselves. If they like to lose their coin, well, let them—in fact, they are the bookie’s chief support, his pals, his friends. True, they drop out as I have said, one by one, sooner or later; but what matters, brother bookies? others always crop up in their places, and so we have nothing to fear.

Again, let me say, that it is the impecunious and needy, and poor silly fool of a backer who brings discredit upon the business, together with the host of thieving, impecunious welshing fraternity who dare call themselves bookmakers and Turf commission agents, who, fairly or unfairly, cop or welsh the small backer of his money.

Now, to point out to the said backer more precisely the reasons why and how he cannot possibly win at backing horses, no matter what plan or system he follows. Let me go a little more into these points, which will or ought to convince him, or at any rate give him matter for serious thought upon the subject.

In the first place, there is what is termed the “law of averages,” by which the backer’s chances to win are for ever against him; that is to say, in nearly every race there are a large number of horses running, otherwise the races are termed non-betting races. Now you back one horse out of say seven or eight running, thus you have at once six or seven chances against your winning. Look how very greatly this works out against the backer when larger numbers of horses are in the race—say 10, 15, 20, and even 30. You back one horse to win, so there are 9, 14, 19, and 29 absolute chances against you, and so on. Never mind about the favourites, the complete outsiders, and so on, there are (and there is no mistake about it) so many absolute chances against your winning, and of course on the other hand so many chances in favour of the bookmaker. But! but! but! listen! ye deluded, cocksure backers! The law of averages against you is nothing to be compared to other and far greater chances against you. I had already written, explained, and set out a number of them, but a newspaper correspondent has very thoughtfully and very carefully embodied them, or some of them, together with others, in a capital letter which appeared in the Sun newspaper one September, and I cannot do better than set them out. The Sun has recently permitted a public debate in its columns upon “Is Betting a Sin?” The debate by correspondence has been most interesting. The religious element, of course, dominated with silly arguments, and in so doing “forgot the subject altogether,” whilst on the other hand many letters were strictly to the point, were eye-openers, and logical. The result was announced by the editor, who decided that “he would give it up,” i.e. the correspondence compelled him to say that he could not say whether betting was a sin or not. My candid opinion is that certainly “betting is not a sin,” but I tell you what it is, it is a pernicious and fascinating vice of the worst kind, and is intimately connected with if not the direct cause of the worst kind of various sins. However, more of this anon. Now to give the letter referred to; it is as follows:—

Odds against the Backer

Sir—I do not profess to enter into the pro or con of this vital question, which is increasing in force and imperativeness with each succeeding year. But to those of your readers—and I fear they are greatly in the majority—who, in spite of experience, fondly believe that it is possible to make money by backing horses, I append a list of 22 chances against the backer in every race that is run.

1. The regular percentage of odds, ranging from 2 to 1 up to 20 against one in every race. There can be only one winner.

2. The horse may be fit and capable of winning, but not “wanted.”

3. “Wanted” by the owner, not “wanted” by the trainer.

4. “Wanted” by owner and trainer, not “wanted” by the jockey, who has his money on another runner.

5. Owner, trainer, or jockey in debt to a bookmaker. In either of these three cases the horse runs to suit the layer’s book, irrespective of the backer.

6. Horse tried to be a certainty—money on. Something wrong with trial horse. All calculations upset. Again the backer loses.

7. Race lost by a bad start.

8. Long delay under a hot sun. Horse irritable, nervous, wears himself out at the post.

9. Some fractious brute who has no place out of a selling race kicks the “certainty” at the post.

10. Jockey disobeys orders, and throws the race away, or goes to sleep.

11. Tiny light weight, caught by steel-knit veteran, fails through weakness. More grist to the bookmaker.

12. A lends B his best trial horse—say Bluebottle—to try Broomstick. Result of trial makes the race a good thing for Broomstick, but a still better thing for A’s old sprinter, Juggler, who has got in with a light weight. A quietly works a starting price job all over the country, and with Juggler just nips Broomstick on the post.

13. Brown lends his crack jockey to ride Jones’s Malaprop, and price shortens. Brown’s money is probably on Gay Deceiver. Jockey obeys orders, and rides Malaprop in Gay Deceiver’s interest.

14. Horse certain to win. Stable forestalled at the last moment. Jockey honest. No help for it. Give the colt a nice refreshing drink of water before the start.

15. Everything lovely. Mount winning easily, when he stumbles and nearly comes down.

16. Jockey makes his effort too late.

17. Jockey secretly owner of horse, other than his mount, running in the same race.

18. Short sprint. Bad draw for position extinguishes chance.

19. Public back the favourite. Stable wins with outsider. See Dieudonne and Jeddah.

20. Crowding at a turn. Jockey hopelessly shut in.

21. Jockey skilfully shuts himself in. “Couldn’t get through, sir.”

22. Horse knocked out of his stride by a cannon during the race.

A famous trainer of the old school said, “I have been in this business through a long life; there is little that anybody can teach me in training. I can do all things in this world with a horse except—be inside him.”

Sceptic.

What a splendid letter this is! How true indeed are the 22 reasons! What thought each one gives to the backer if he is a sensible man and will but think over them. How we bookies know full well the absolute truth of them, as do also the jocks, trainers, and owners. We have referred in conversation to the Sun correspondence. What care we for it? It won’t stop the fascinated backer. No fear; we persuade ourselves that nothing will stop him except “running the length of his tether.”

It is almost amusing to read in the newspapers the excuses given by the “Racing Prophets” for the predicted horses “not pulling it off.” Almost daily you will find some of the above reasons given. I have just picked up the Daily Mail. Racing at Nottingham is described as “an unsatisfactory affair.” For whom? The bookmakers? Certainly not. For whom then? Why, the backers of course. Then comes the usual and oft-told excuses—amongst others—why such and such a horse did not win, as follows:—

Excuse No. 1.—“The well-backed Shot Gun ... threw no resolution into his work.”

Excuse No. 2.—“Eileen Violet too ... ran a snatchy race throughout.”

Excuse No. 3.—“Reminiscence having missed a race at Newmarket through the imprudence of her jockey in leaving off riding too soon, she yesterday, when heavily backed to square matters, had her chance entirely destroyed by the falling of Lady St. George.”

Excuse No. 4.—“The Bestwood Nursery ... demonstrated how fluky was the victory of the Asteria Filly at Newmarket.”

The above are cuttings from one paper only—we get such excuses to “soothe the backer” almost every day in one paper or another. In a case reported in the Daily Telegraph, the judge of the Clerkenwell County Court made this remark:—

I don’t profess to be any authority on horse-racing, but I know it depends upon what the odds are and what the jockeys have been paid as to which horse wins. (Laughter.)

I guess that judge knows more about racing than he would wish us to believe.

What is the impecunious backer? Why, a fool of the first order. A fascinated idiot. A sharp, flat, and very often a thief, i.e. he steals other people’s money in order to “put it on.” If the above cogent reasons and facts won’t decide him to stop backing, then nothing will, except ruin. Let him carefully think over all I have said. Let him think over his own experience—that’s the thing. Has he made money at backing horses? I mean, in the long run. How much has he lost? That’s the point; let him ask himself the question.

The backer of horses, as a rule, takes to it as a business by which to make money, as in every other business. Every business and profession (for a master man at any rate) is a speculation. Betting is a business, but a speculative and, I should say, the most speculative kind of business there is. There is nothing wrong or sinful in betting. But it is a business so very speculative, so very much against the backer, that, as I hope I have proved, it is a fool’s game, and for business considerations only it is best left alone.

In addition, however, to the reasons before set out, why the backing of horses never will pay any one (let “the sportsman” be never so clever and cunning), there are in addition other and more potent reasons of force. Yes! forcible reasons why the respectable person should not meddle with it, at least, until the greatest reforms have taken place.

Look, for instance, at the class and character of those regularly participating and taking part in betting pursuits and attending race meetings. Think for a moment who and what the majority are. I advisedly say the majority, and I wish to emphasise it. Ask the police; ask the railway people; ask any one who has to come in contact with them. Betting and the race meetings collect together huge assemblies of the lowest and vilest scoundrels on earth—thieves, cheats, ruffians, highwaymen, vagabonds, returned convicts, castaways, ne’er-do-wells, welshers, card-sharpers, tricksters, foul-mouthed quadrupeds, villains, and the worst form of humanity that it is possible to get together—many of them superbly clothed and well dressed—all, all, in some way or other preying upon the thousands upon thousands of the fools of backers in one way or another. This is truth; deny it who can! Can any one name an attraction that draws together one-tenth of this scum of the earth? No; we all know it. Don’t let me be misunderstood, for goodness’ sake! I am not inferring that all who attend race meetings are to be classed in the above frightful category. Certainly not. We have the very best people—the most respectable, the politest of persons, from the highest in the land to the lowliest—in their thousands also; but I should say that for every respectable person there are fifty otherwise.