Gamble

“ To gamble, says my dictionary, is “to play for money in games of skill or chance,” and it adds the information that the word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon gamen, which means “a game”. Now, to me this definition is particularly interesting, because it justifies all that I have been thinking about the gambling spirit in connexion with Premium Bonds. I am against Premium Bonds, but not for the popular reason. ”

“ The gamins of the street gamble for ‘LoukouniLoukouni,’ little sticks of what looks like ‘Turkish Delight.’ In all the towns one may see at the street corners, the ‘hakimal,’ or ‘fakirs,’ with their packs of greasy cards, wheels of fortune, and little cunning traps of dingy brass work into which you drop small pieces of money and see whether it will ever reach the bottom. ”

“ You know as well as I do that gambling in any shape or form is forbidden here, and yet you not only do it yourself, but you teach smaller fellows than yourself to gamble, and you fill your pocket by the process. ”

“ I have a horror of gambling, and should always do my utmost to discourage others who have an inclination for it, as I consider that gambling, like intemperance, is one of the greatest curses which a country could be afflicted with.
“Horse-racing may produce gambling or it may not, but I have always looked upon it as a manly sport which is popular with Englishmen of all classes, and there is no reason why it should be looked upon as a gambling transaction. Alas! those who gamble will gamble at anything. ”

“ My object is to sustain the following propositions:
22 First.—Men have gambled in all ages of the world. That they will continue to do so is a reasonable presumption. To gamble would seem instinctive—inherent in the souls of mankind and fostered by the very nature of their environment. ”

“ The judges and the lawyers and the doctors and the priests gamble; and there are gentlemen gamblers by profession! You will see squads of poor peons daily, men, women and boys, sitting on the ground around a deck of cards in the Public Square, gambling for the smallest stakes. ”

“ They are all proven. Gambling is his besetting sin. He [Pg 113] is sober, industrious, frugal, enduring beyond belief, but he will gamble on Sunday and quarrel over his cards, and when he sticks his partner in the heat of the quarrel, the partner is not apt to tell. He prefers to bide his time. ”

“ In some way he must meet expenses and insure a livelihood. For an honest gambler the maintenance of a private club is seldom possible.
“But public gambling would be a temptation to the poor man. You admit that poor men should not gamble?” ”

“ Guests at the hotels of every large town are persecuted by solicitations to gamble, while the Mayor and Common Council of the average city indulge in raids at a set time, for the simple reason that the officers of the law exact and receive a percentage on the profits of every game which they tolerate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Millions fly away in great gambling speculations as easily and as swiftly as the penny of the newsboy takes its flight from one to the other of the inveterate little gamblers, to be found among these sharp witted waifs of the street. It goes on in billiard halls, where “hap hazard” is openly played; at saloon bars where the loser at dice “pays for the drinks.” ”

“ There, on that most sacred spot in all the universe, in the holiest hour ever marked on the dial of time, when heaven, earth and hell are quick with interest, who is it sits unmoved, unobservant, unstirred, concerned only with the game? Ruthless gamblers sit beneath the lowering skies, and on the palsied earth they shake the dice to win the garments of the man of sorrows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether it was that the gamblers, expert in the reading of a man's mood and intentions, sensed the fact that Orde might be led to plunge, or whether, more simply, they were using him as a capper to draw the crowd into their game, it would be difficult to say, but twice more they bungled the throw and permitted him to win. ”

“ Another lion which is preying upon our pathway is the vice of gambling. In destructive power I place it next to intemperance, for it is just as fascinating when it gets a hold on a man. I know gamblers that never touch a drink of whiskey. There are scores of our boys and girls going down to destruction, through the door of the gambling hell. There are some people who profess to think there is no harm in a game of cards. ”

“ I became known as a gambler, but not as what is understood as a sport, for I never drank, or mixed with fast society. Unless you have been a gambler and a regular frequenter of gambling places, you have no idea of the extraordinary-looking people who seem to have money to risk on the turn of a card or a wheel. ”

“ In the forenoon, when gambling was slack, the gamblers would get up from their tables, and, leaving exposed upon them, at the mercy of the heterogeneous crowd circulating through the room, piles of gold and silver, they would walk away, seemingly as little anxious for the safety of their money as if it were under lock and key in an iron chest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Once she has acquired the taste for gambling, she will never leave the roulette-table, but, of sheer perversity and temper, will stake her all, and lose it. In cases such as hers a gambler can never be torn away from the game ”

“ Nothing can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement, the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared to witness, there is not a sign. ”

“ These familiars thrive and fatten on the gamblers; spoils pour in on them, in every conceivable way. One encumbers the successful gambler with obtrusive help about his hat—a florin; another has a bag of old gloves, which he pins down round the table, when the play begins. ”

“ These are the canaille of gamblers, who hang precariously on the edge of a terrible fascination, and manage to supply the necessities of life in a cheap way, from chance success in small bets and by a few dollars picked up by guiding more profitable customers to the houses where they are known. ”

“ Taking the gamblers apart, one by one, I lent each one of the four two dollars, with which to sit in a poker game which I told them I was about to open and in which I proposed to take a hand myself. To an old and penniless gambler, the prospect of enjoying all the excitement of poker playing without any risk is an alluring prospect. ”

“ Instead he gambles."
"Father only plays in amiable little games, for the sake of charity, Aunt Hannah." Hamilton smiled indulgently as he enlightened her. "You could hardly call it gambling. In gambling there is an element of chance. Father merely contributes." ”

“ When one becomes a thorough gambler, he is like that tree lightning-smitten, rotten in root, dry in branch, and sapless; seasoned hard and tough; nothing lives beneath it, nothing on its branches, unless a hawk or a vulture perches for a moment to whet its beak, and fly screaming away for its prey.
To every young man who indulges in the least form of gambling, I raise a warning voice! Under the specious name of AMUSEMENT, you are laying the foundation of gambling. Playing is the seed which comes up gambling. It is the light wind which brings up the storm. ”

“ PRELIMINARY REMARKS—FOOD FOR REFLECTION. Only gamblers defend gambling. Those who play faro, roulette, hazard; those who buy mutual pools or “puts and calls;” and even those whose instinct for gaming is satisfied with a partly legitimate business, go on with their practices without an analysis of their actions. It is the object of this work, not only to trace the history of gaming, so far as is recorded, but to expose to the mind of the most casual reader the sophistries upon which the art of gambling is based. ”

“ They play at draughts also with dice, a sort of backgammon. Professional gamblers prefer dice to any other game, as it is the most gambling of all. When they have lost all their money, they stake their fields, their house, their children, their wives, and, as a last resort, themselves when they have nothing else left, and their antagonist agrees to let them make such a final stake. ”

“ Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of trente-et-quarante. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. ”

“ Professional gamblers, almost without exception, die paupers. Nor is the reason far to seek. The gambler “on the inside,” is likely to win, even if the game is fairly played; and the skin dealer never loses, even by accident. But the curse of Heaven seems to attach to money thus accumulated. The winners rarely keep it long. The terrible fascination of the mania for gaming 212is no less potent with professionals than amateurs. ”

“ But what was it to the sight of that dense crowd around the play-table, where avarice, greed of gain, recklessness, and despair are mingled, giving, even to faces of manly vigour and openness, expressions of low cunning and vulgar meaning? There is a terrible sameness in the gambler’s look, a blending of slavish terror with a resolution to brave the worst, almost demoniacal in its fierceness. ”

“ If they play for money—or, at all events, if they play for such sums as make the winning or losing an object of any degree of consequence—they become gamblers; and of the many bad passions which gambling sometimes calls into activity, and of the destructive consequences which it entails, no one is ignorant. ”

“ The reason unquestionably is that some of those who in former days, were among the chief patrons of the game have had their eyes opened to the dangers that lurk in “social gambling.” During the palmy days of the “clubs,” professional gamblers sometimes succeeded in securing admission to a game as visitors. “Once upon a time,” as the children’s chroniclers say, a polished stranger “from the East” appeared at the leading hostelry. ”

“ Young man! stand back from all styles of gambling! The end thereof is death. The gamblers enter the ten-pin alley where are husbands, brothers, and fathers. "Put down your thousand dollars all in gold eagles! Let the boy set up the pins at the other end of the alley! Now stand back, and give the gamester full sweep! Roll the first—there! it strikes! and down goes his respectability. Try it again. Roll the second—there! it strikes! and down goes the last feeling of humanity. ”

“ To win, the tricks of the gambler must be used; friends must be inveigled to their ruin; advantages must be seized; a sight of the opponent’s cards must be used for whatever it will win, and one 69step after another gradually reduces the player to a condition in which he secretly knows he is a rogue. Others about him have long known it. The true philosopher knows it the moment the “high-minded player” sits down to the game. ”

“ You talk to hundreds of young men. SirSir, tell them this, tell it with burning eloquence, tell it with pleading tears, beware of gaming, shun gamblers as lepers. Cards are accursed of God, and pass-ports to perdition. ”

“ If there were not a constant influx of tyro-gamblers this number would not be supported. Their agents stroll about the town, visiting public house parlors, and houses where cribbage-players resort, whist clubs, also billiard and bagatelle tables, experience having taught them that the man who plays at one game, if the opportunity be afforded him, is ever ready to plunge deeper into the vice of gambling on a large scale. Junior clerks, and the upper class of gentlemen’s servants are the men whom they chiefly attack. ”

“ So he went day by day to the gambling hall, and playing with his dice, won great sums of money, and lived at his ease, feasting himself and others. But one night, when he was sitting among the gamblers in the gambling hall, throwing the dice, he heard behind him a noise of shuffling. ”