CHAPTER XXIII.

GAMBLING.

Credo. I believe in dice;

Without a penny for the price,
Full often have they got me meat,
Good wine to drink and friends to treat;
And sometimes, too, when luck went worse,
They've stripped me clean of robe and purse.

-Rutefeuf.

There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err; earth in itself
Contains at once the evil and the cure;
And all-sufficing nature can chastise

Those who transgress her law-she only knows
How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits.

-Shelley.

Johnson. Depend upon it, sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by gaming? You will not find six instances in an age. There is a strange rout made about deep play, whereas you have many more people ruined by adventurous trade, and yet we do not hear such an outcry against it.

Thrale. There may be few absolutely ruined by deep play, but very many are much hurt in their circumstances by it.

Johnson. Yes, sir, and so are very many by other kinds of expense.

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Johnson. It is not roguery to play with a man who is ignorant of the game while you are master of it, and so win his money, for he thinks he can play better than you, as you think you can play better than he, and the superior skill carries it.

Erskine. He is a fool, but you are not a rogue.

Johnson. That's much about the truth, sir. It must be considered that a man who only does what every one of the society to which he belongs would do, is not a dishonest man.

Boswell. So, then, sir, you do not think ill of a man who wins, perhaps, forty thousand pounds in a winter?

Johnson. Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man, but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.

-Boswell's Johnson.

A PRIMARY principle of ethics is that every individual may freely act his pleasure as long as he does not interfere with the rights of others. He may claim for himself every gratification which does not

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limit others in their gratifications. He may come and go, he may buy and sell, he may marry, preach, or develop a mine, and in all this legitimately better his condition, provided he does not make worse the condition of those, or any of them, with whom he comes in contact.

The true theory of business is that traffic which does not result in reciprocal advantages to buyer and seller is illegitimate, or at least abnormal. Let it be registered in men's minds that he who accumulates wealth to the loss of another is a bad man following a bad business. He is a swindler, and should be punished as one.

In this way men may build railroads; but they must not employ the power thus acquired in impositions upon the people, subsidizing competition to keep up iniquitous prices, buying legislators, and corrupting morals and society, building up or ruining this man or that town or industry, and exercising a hateful tyranny over a long-suffering and pusillanimous people. Men may buy and sell wheat, but they may not so 'corner' it as by their trickery to make consumers pay twice or thrice its value. Men may in good faith develop mines; but the manipulation of mining stocks as practised by brokers and bonanza chiefs is worse than ordinary gambling and stealingbeing more on a par with three-card monte, and like cheating and confidence games.

We all know the evils of gambling; how it dissatisfies society in its daily occupations, absorbs thought, dissipates energy, and renders men unfit for that steady application and reasonable economy which alone make a community prosperous. It destroys the finer qualities both of mind and feeling; it makes men moody and nervous, makes them live a life of extremes, now exhilarated by success, now despondent through failure. What folly! Some play for money, but with the percentage against them they should know that in the end they are sure to lose. Some

FOR PROFIT OR PLEASURE.

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play for pleasure; but if they ponder for a moment they must know that like drink it is but a pleasure that is sure to end in pain.

Epicurus denounced all pleasures productive of pain. No one has the moral right to obtain money or pleasure in any manner detrimental to public well-being. "This kind of action," says Herbert Spencer, "is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, cultivates a hard egotism, and so produces a general deterioration of character and conduct." All moral occupations imply the rendering of an equivalent for money received.

Is not society here, as in other cases, such as polygamy, prostitution, monopoly, and mongolianism, inclined to carry the sentiment against the professional gambling game to an extreme? Why go so far out of our way to play the prude or hypocrite? Unquestionably there are honest gamblers and dishonest gamblers. There are professional gamblers who will wax cards or use an imperfect pack, or cheat in a variety of ways, just as a shop-keeper will sell you an inferior article, overcharge, or otherwise take undue advantage; there are gamblers and shop-keepers who will not do these things. It is safe to assert that as a rule there is proportionately no more cheating and overreaching in the clubrooms of our cities than in the stock boards of our cities, or in very many of the avenues of commerce. It is safe to

assert that there is more iniquity committed, more political, commercial, and social demoralization perpetrated by the monopolists of the United States in one day than is achieved by all the gamblers, prostitutes, and polygamists in a twelve-month.

Since very early times gambling has been held infamous by most civilized nations. Aristotle declared a gamester to be no better than a thief. Stringent laws against games of hazard, except during the Saturnalia, were passed by the Roman senate; nevertheless the people played. Jews, Mahometans, and

Christians all set their faces against games of chance. The Talmud censures them. No Hindoo gambler was allowed to testify in courts. The duke of Clarence in 1469 prohibited gambling in his household except at the "xii dayes in Christmasse."

Silly Charles VI. of France played with painted cards; some say they were first made for his use in 1392, though of this there is no proof; since which time the mischief has often been played with them, though this was not the fault of the cards.

During the reign of Henry VII. card-playing was very generally in vogue; so much so that it was prohibited by law. Apprentices the edict especially regarded, forbidding them to play with cards except during the Christmas holidays, and in their master's houses.

Peculiar as was the character of some of the wagers in California, there were none here so indecent or irreverent as were exposed by the law courts of England fifty years ago-instance the case of Joanna Southcote, an unmarried woman, upon whose delivery of a male child, a new Messiah, within certain days was bet £200 to £100; a wager that Napoleon would be removed from St Helena within a certain time, a wager upon the sex of a femininelooking man, upon a decree of a court, upon the death of one's father, and the like.

The merchant does not grow rich, as moralists sometimes aver, by the debauched lives of the young, nor the husbandman by the scarcity and consequent dearness of his grain, nor the architect by the decay of buildings. It is true that doctors live by the diseases of mankind, and priests by the principle of evil, and lawyers by disputes. Good springs from evil, and life from death. As Montague says, "Ce que considérant, il m'ést venu en fantasie, comme nature ne se desment point en cela de sa général polici, car les physiciens tiennent que la naissance, nourissement, et augmentation de chacque chose est l'altération et corruption d'une aultre."

CHANCE OR SUPERSTITION.

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Some teach us how to be learned, others how to be rich, and others, again, how to be lucky. Gamblers have their doctrine of chances and runs of luck. Thus, if a particular number or card wins twice or thrice in succession, the chances are in favor of its winning once or twice more.

Chance is a superstition; there is no such thing as accident, no deviation from the inexorable laws of nature, any more than there is a veritable war-god, weather-god, or Great Cloud Manipulator.

The laws of fortune are not unjust nor partial because they tend to unequal favors. We may not blaspheme fortune for sending the ball into the wrong pocket, when with our own hand we forced it there; or for giving us inferior cards, when with our own fingers we shuffled and dealt them. Like all the laws of nature and of man, the laws which govern chance are reasonable and just. There is no guardian angel or spiteful demon lurking near the cards or dice to turn them in our favor. We turn them with our fingers. The operation is purely a mechanical one. Put the dice into the cup always exactly in the same manner, and shake them always the same, and the same side is always sure to be uppermost. It is not true that the dice of the gods are always loaded. Men may load their dice to suit themselves, and blind chance be frustrated if they have the ability. That is to say, dice will fall as they are thrown and there is no chance about it.

Gambling is reprobate not chiefly because it tends to the ruin of him who indulges in it, his family and friends; not chiefly because of its evil associations and alienation from healthy pursuits, but because it produces profit and pleasure to one at the cost of loss and pain to another. It must be admitted that while many came to California to seek their fortunes, some came to seek for other people's fortunes.

We are apt to regard gambling, drunkenness, licentiousness, indulgence in the use of tobacco and the

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