Henry Ward Beecher

“ With the name of Judge is associated ideas of immaculate purity, sober piety, and fearless, favorless justice. Let it then be counted a dark crime for a recreant official so far to forget his reverend place, and noble office, as to run the gantlet of filthy vices, and make the word Judge, to suggest an incontinent trifler, who smites with his mouth, and smirks with his eye; who holds the rod to strike the criminal, and smites only the law to make a gap for criminals to pass through! If God loves this land, may he save it from truckling, drinking, swearing, gambling, vicious Judges! ”

“ Besides these, time would fail me to describe the ineffable dignity of a gambling judge; the cautious, phlegmatic lawyer, gambling from sheer avarice; the broken-down and cast-away politician, seeking in the game the needed excitement, and a fair field for all the base tricks he once played off as a patriot; the pert, sharp, keen, jockey-gambler; the soaked, obese, plethoric, wheezing, bacchanal; and a crowd of ignoble worthies, wearing all the badges and titles of vice, throughout its base peerage. ”

“ The drinking-booth smokes when he draws in his welcome suit. Did you see him only by day, flaming in apparel, jovial and free-hearted at the Restaurateur or Hotel, you would think him a Prince let loose—a cross between Prince Hal and Falstaff.
But night is his day. These are mere exercises, and brief prefaces to his real accomplishments. He is a good fellow, who dares play deeper; he is wild indeed, who seems wilder; and he is keen indeed, who is sharper than he is, after all this show of frankness. No one is quicker, slyer, and more alert at a game. ”

“ There is a frank way, and a mean way of doing a wicked thing. The gambler takes the meanest way of doing the dirtiest deed. The victim's own partner is sucking his blood; it is a league of sharpers, to get his money at any rate; and the wickedness is so unblushing and unmitigated, that it gives, at last, an instance of what the deceitful human heart, knavish as it is, is ashamed to try to cover or conceal; but confesses with helpless honesty, that it is fraud, cheating, stealing, robbery,—and nothing else. ”

“ Amusement will be the plea. At the beginning the game will excite enthusiasm, pride of skill, the love of mastery, and the love of money. The love of money, at first almost imperceptible, at last will rule out all the rest,—like Aaron's rod,—a serpent, swallowing every other serpent. Generosity, enthusiasm, pride and skill, love of mastery, will be absorbed in one mighty feeling,—the savage lust of lucre. ”

“ Gaming, as it springs from a principle of our nature, has, in some form, probably existed in every age. We trace it in remote periods and among the most barbarous people. It loses none of its fascinations among a civilized people. On the contrary, the habit of fierce stimulants, the jaded appetite of luxury, and the satiety of wealth, seem to invite the master-excitant. Our land, not apt to be behind in good or evil, is full of gambling in all its forms—the gambling of commerce, the gambling of bets and wagers, and the gambling of games of hazard. ”

“ Oh ye! who have thought the way to hell was bleak and frozen as Norway, parched and barren as Sahara, strewed like Golgotha with bones and skulls reeking with stench like the vale of Gehenna,—witness your mistake! The way to hell is gorgeous! It is a highway, cast up; no lion is there, no ominous bird to hoot a warning, no echoings of the wailing-pit, no lurid gleams of distant fires, or moaning sounds of hidden woe! Paradise is imitated to build you a way to death; the flowers of heaven are stolen and poisoned ”

“ A gambling mechanic finds his labor less relishful as his passion for play increases. He grows unsteady, neglects his work, becomes unfaithful to promises; what he performs he slights. Little jobs seem little enough; he desires immense contracts, whose uncertainty has much the excitement of gambling—and for the best of reasons; and in the pursuit of great and sudden profits, by wild schemes, he stumbles over into ruin, leaving all who employed or trusted him in the rubbish of his speculations.
A gambling lawyer, neglecting the drudgery of his profession, will court its exciting duties. ”

“ I have condensed into one account the separate parts of this gambling transaction as narrated by each evangelist. How marked in every age is a Gambler's character! The enraged priesthood of ferocious sects taunted Christ's dying agonies; the bewildered multitude, accustomed to cruelty, could shout; but no earthly creature, but a Gambler, could be so lost to all feeling as to sit down coolly under a dying man to wrangle for his garments, and arbitrate their avaricious differences by casting dice for his tunic, with hands spotted with his spattered blood, warm and yet undried upon them. ”

“ What less than this is it, when a man will stake that property which is to give his family bread, and that honor which gives them place and rank in society?
When playing becomes desperate gambling, the heart is a hearth where all the fires of gentle feelings have smouldered to ashes; [Pg 22] and a thorough-paced gamester could rattle dice in a charnel-house, and wrangle for his stakes amid murder and pocket gold dripping with the blood of his own kindred.
III. Gambling is the parent and companion of every vice which pollutes the heart, or injures society. ”

“ The opening and ending are fatally connected, and drawn toward each other with almost irresistible attraction. If gambling is a vortex, playing is the outer ring of the Maelstrom. The thousand pound stake, the whole estate put up on a game—what are these but the instruments of kindling that tremendous excitement which a diseased heart craves? What is the amusement for which you play but the excitement of the game? And for what but this does the jaded gambler play? You differ from him only in the degree of the same feeling. Do not solace yourself that you shall escape because others have ”

“ Gambling is founded upon the very worst perversion of this powerful element of our nature. It heats every part of the mind like an oven. The faculties which produce calculation, pride of skill, of superiority, love of gain, hope, fear, jealousy, hatred, are absorbed in the game, and exhilarated, or exacerbated by victory or defeat. ”

“ Our land has little to fear from abroad, and much from within. We can bear foreign aggression, scarcity, the revulsions of commerce, plagues, and pestilences; but we cannot bear vicious Judges, corrupt Courts, gambling Legislators, and a vicious, corrupt, and gambling constituency. Let us not be deceived! The decay of civil institutions begins at the core. The outside wears all the lovely hues of ripeness, when the inside is rotting. Decline does not begin in bold and startling acts ”

“ Gambling is the staking or winning of property upon mere hazard. The husbandman renders produce for his gains; the mechanic renders the product of labor and skill for his gains; the gambler renders for his gain the sleights of useless skill, or more often, downright cheating. Betting is gambling; there is no honest equivalent to its gains. Dealings in fancy-stocks are oftentimes sheer gambling, with all its worst evils. Profits so earned are no better than the profits of dice, cards, or hazard. ”

“ Had you swallowed corrosive poison, would it ease your convulsions to think there was only one chance in fifty for you? I do not call every man who plays a gambler, but a gambler in embryo. Let me trace your course from the amusement of innocent playing to its almost inevitable end. ”

“ But the mariner upon life's sea, carries no chart of other men's voyages, drives before every wind that will speed him, draws upon horrid shores with slumbering crew, or heads in upon roaring reefs as though he would not perish where thousands have perished before him.
Hell is populated with the victims of "harmless amusements." Will man never learn that the way to hell is through the valley of DECEIT? The power of Satan to hold his victims is nothing to that mastery of art by which he first gains them. ”

“ There is another gambler, cowardly, sleek, stealthy, humble, mousing, and mean—a simple blood-sucker. For money, he will be a tool to other gamblers; steal for them, and from them; he plays the jackal, and searches victims for them, humbly satisfied to pick the bones afterward. Thus, (to employ his own language,) he ropes in the inexperienced young, flatters them, teaches them, inflames their passions, purveys to their appetites, cheats them, debauches them, draws them down to his own level, and then lords it over them in malignant meanness. ”

“ Shall we pretend to virtue, and purity, and religion, and yet make partners of our social life, men whose heart has conceived such damnable deeds, and whose hands have performed them? Shall there be even in the eye of religion no difference between the corrupter of youth and their guardian? Are all the lines and marks of morality so effaced, is the nerve and courage of virtue so quailed by the frequency and boldness of flagitious crimes, that men, covered over with wickedness, shall find their iniquity no obstacle to their advancement among a Christian people. ”

“ But to advocate, to engage in fiery contests with keen opponents, this is nearly as good as gambling. Many a ruined client has cursed the law, and cursed a stupid jury, and cursed everybody for his irretrievable loss, except his lawyer, who gambled all night when he should have prepared the case, and came half asleep and debauched into court in the morning to lose a good case mismanaged, and snatched from his gambling hands by the art of sober opponents. ”

“ Ye who are meddling with the edges of vice, ye are on this road!—and utterly duped by its enchantments! Your eye has already lost its honest glance, your taste has lost its purity, your heart throbs with poison! The leprosy is all over you, its [Pg 39] blotches and eruptions cover you. Your feet stand on slippery places, whence in due time they shall slide, if you refuse the warning which I raise. They shall slide from heaven, never to be visited by a gambler; slide down to that fiery abyss below you, out of which none ever come. ”

“ Gambling vitiates the imagination, corrupts the tastes, destroys the industry—for no man will drudge for cents, who gambles for dollars by the hundred; or practise a piddling economy, while, with almost equal indifference, he makes or loses five hundred in a night.
II. For a like reason, it destroys all domestic habits and affections. Home is a prison to an inveterate gambler; there is no air there that he can breathe. ”

“ With such Judges I must associate corrupt Legislators, whose bawling patriotism leaks out in all the sinks of infamy at the Capital. These living exemplars of vice, pass still-born laws against vice. Are such men sent to the Capital only to practise debauchery? Laborious seedsmen—they gather every germ of evil; and laborious sowers—at home they strew them far and wide! It is a burning shame, a high outrage, that public men, by corrupting the [Pg 35] young with the example of manifold vices, should pay back their constituents for their honors! ”

“ But a worse thief may meet me, decoy my steps, and by a greater dishonesty, filch ten thousand dollars,—and what then? The story spreads, the sharpers move abroad unharmed, no one stirs. It is the day's conversation; and like a sound it rolls to the distance, and dies in an echo.
Shall such astounding iniquities be vomited out amidst us, and no man care? Do we love our children, and yet let them walk in a den of vipers? ”

“ Very different is the roistering gamester. He bears a jolly face, a glistening eye something watery through watching and drink. His fingers are manacled in rings; his bosom grows with pearls and diamonds. He learns the time which he wastes from a watch full gorgeously carved, (and not with the most modest scenes,) and slung around his neck by a ponderous golden chain. There is not so splendid a fellow to be seen sweeping through the streets. ”

“ Thou hast made a league with death, and unto death shalt thou go.
Let us here pause, to draw the likeness of a few who stand conspicuous in that vulgar crowd of gamblers, with which hereafter he will consort. The first is a taciturn, quiet man. No one knows when he comes into town, or when he leaves. No man hears of his gaining; for he never boasts, nor reports his luck. He spends little for parade; his money seems to go and come only through the game. He reads none, converses none, is neither a glutton nor a hard drinker ”

“ A detail of the evils of gambling should be preceded by an illustration of that constitution of mind out of which they mainly spring—I mean its EXCITABILITY. The body is not stored with a fixed amount of strength, nor the mind with a uniform measure of excitement; but both are capable, by stimulation, of expansion of strength or feeling, almost without limit. Experience shows, that within certain bounds, excitement is healthful and necessary, but beyond this limit, exhausting and destructive. ”

“ The night is getting old; its dank air grows fresher; the east is grey; the gaming and drinking and hilarious laughter are over, and the youths wending homeward. What says conscience? No matter what it says; they did not hear, and we will not. Whatever was said, it was very shortly answered thus: "This has not been gambling; all were gentlemen; there was no cheating; simply a convivial evening; no stakes except the bills incident to the entertainment. If anybody blames a young man for a little innocent exhilaration on a special occasion, he is a superstitious bigot ”

“ When the double fires of dice and brandy blaze under a man, he will soon be consumed. If men are found who do not drink, they are the more noticeable because exceptions.
V. It is, even in its fairest form, the almost inevitable cause of dishonesty. Robbers have robbers' honor; thieves have thieves' law; and pirates conform to pirates' regulations. But where is there a gambler's code? One law there is, and this is not universal, pay your gambling debts. But on the wide question, how is it fair to win—what law is there? What will shut a man out from a gambler's club? ”

“ In almost every form of iniquity there is some shade or trace of good. We have in [Pg 27] gambling a crime standing alone—dark, malignant, uncompounded wickedness! It seems in its full growth a monster without a tender mercy, devouring its own offspring without one feeling but appetite. A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential spirit of concentrated avaricious selfishness. His intellect is a living thing, quickened with double life for villany ”