Gambling den

“ I assume that no one can say a word in favour of gambling, nor even excuse it. It is no doubt a feeble apology to claim that there are degrees of gambling, that every race-course and every Bourse exhibits a more pernicious and more damaging form of “play” than can be laid to the charge of the Casino. The gambler at Monte Carlo injures no one directly but himself. ”

“ Who does not know how fascinating an excitement gambling is, particularly at watering-places, during the season, where every visitor, having laid aside his ordinary habits and course of life, deliberately gives himself up to leisure and ease and exhilarating enjoyment? then gambling becomes an irresistible attraction. People who at other times never touch a card are to be seen amongst the most eager players; and besides, it is the fashion, especially in higher circles, for every one to visit the bank in the evening and lose a little money at play. ”

“ Every object that met the eye was encompassed with gambling—from the aristocratic Rouge et Noir, Roulette, and Hazard, down to Thimble-rig, Tossing, and Tommy Dodd. Every hour of the day and night was beset with gambling diversified; in short, gambling must occupy the whole man, or he was lost to the sport and spirit of the place. The inhumanity of the cock-pit, the iniquitous vortex of the Hazard table, employed each leisure moment from the race, and either swallowed up the emoluments of the victorious field, or sank the jockey still deeper in the gulf of ruin. ”

“ There is some chance at faro, if the game is square. But roulette; bah! It is plain robbery."
"The blind Madonna of the Pagan, as Stevenson called chance," mused the colonel, lighting a cigar. "I often wonder if gambling is not as much a particle of our blood as salt. Perhaps you have all wondered why I never have kept a racing-stable, why I play bridge and poker for fun. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I made a bet, lost it, got stuck, and feverishly played in my last dollar.
This gambling habit is the curse of a thief’s life. He loses his last dime and is forced to go out in haste for more money. Like a mechanic broke and out of a job, he takes the first one in sight. He has no time to pick and choose, or calculate carefully what he is about; he must eat, and the minute he goes broke he gets hungry. Gambling keeps him broke, forces him to steal small money on short notice and take prohibitive and unnatural chances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Being a stranger in the town, I went into almost all the houses, and found them playing, in some with dice, and in some with balls, at the different games, the names of all of which I do not know: but gambling was going on to this extent, and no check to it, whatever, was put by the local authorities. At the same time, upon the race course, the thimble men were in hundreds, with their tables, as well as by the roadsides on every approach to Doncaster, playing, and cheating the people out of their money, as fast as they could induce them to play. ”

“ Now, as a game for recreation and pastime, I do not object to it; it is said to possess qualities as an intellectual game, superior even to whist. But when engaged in for the purpose of gambling, I class it with other games in which professional gamblers live and thrive, by cheating and robbing those with whom they play. It has been said there is no such thing as a [10] ‘Square Gambler’; and a well-known Wall Street banker has said: ‘Whoever plays poker will cheat.’ I can not agree with the latter, but, with my definition of a gambler, I fully agree with the former. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ We gamble in the funds. We gamble in endless companies (limited) —all resulting from the same passion of our nature, which led to the gambling of former times with cards, with dice, at Piquet, Basset, Faro, Hazard, E O, Roulette, and Rouge et Noir. At a recent memorable trial, the Lord Chief Justice of England exclaimed—'There can be no doubt—any one who looks around him cannot fail to perceive—that a spirit of speculation and gambling has taken hold of the minds of large classes of the population. ”

“ The instruments of gaming may differ, but the principle is the same. The shuffling and dealing of cards, however full of temptation, is not gambling, unless stakes are put up; while, on the other hand, gambling may be carried on without cards, or dice, or billiards, or a ten-pin alley. The man who bets on horses, on elections, on battles—the man who deals in "fancy" stocks, or conducts a business which extra hazards capital, or goes into transactions without foundation, but dependent upon what men call "luck," is a gambler. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ridiculous as it may be that I should expect so much for myself from roulette, yet I consider even more ridiculous the conventional opinion accepted by all that it is stupid and absurd to expect anything from gambling. And why should gambling be worse than any other means of making money—for instance, commerce? It is true that only one out of a hundred wins, but what is that to me? ”

“ 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. ”

“ While I was running a saloon in Columbia, Missouri—which was in fact, but a cloak for secret “brace” gambling—I had an apparatus of this sort attached to a peep-hole in such a manner that I could readily signal to my confederate when it was safe for him to bet high. Of all victims in the world the “skin” gambler is especially rejoiced to meet a man who is in the habit of drinking to excess. During my entire career as a gambler I always felt reasonably sure of winning the money of such a man. ”

“ The winner is not reverenced, and the loser is not pitied. But it is a disease that is most contagious, and if a man is known to have made a lucky coup, say, on the Stock Exchange, hundreds rush in to follow his example, as they would were a successful gold field discovered—the warning of those that perish by the way is unheeded.
Of the universality of gambling there is no doubt, and it seems to be inherent in human nature. ”

“ Gambling, my dear; male and female gambling, nothing more, nothing less. The horses run for money. The jockeys ride for money. The men bet money, hats, gloves, hundreds, thousands, on this horse and that. Everybody gambles, and everybody likes it.
Sisters, that poor man's hat was a pool; there wasn't a drop of water in it; still it was a pool. The two five-cent pieces I threw into it were a dead loss to charity. The scraps of crumpled paper meant dollars. The heap of bills that I tucked away in my pocket-book, innocent as twenty lambs, was money that I had won gambling, ignorantly, innocently. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The generality of the minor gambling houses are kept by prize-fighters and other desperate characters, who bully and hector the more timid out of their money by deciding that bets have been lost, when, in fact, they have been won. ”

“ Those outside the pale must perforce be satisfied to stake their money in the bucket shops against the Chicago quotations. In the opinion of many reflecting men this is the most pernicious form of the vice, because a large number of eminently respectable people persist in not regarding it as gambling, but consider it as merely a speculation. This delusion blinds many victims who would not for the universe enter a gambling house and put down their money on a fair layout, or bet on the whirl of the roulette wheel. ”

“ Still, at the present time, gambling is extensively carried on in the city, although it seldom appears upon the surface, except in a few instances which will be mentioned below. At the same time it is a notorious fact that, unless in the cases of a few misguided interlopers who have neglected to “square” themselves with the “powers that be,” no gambler is ever arrested or a gaming resort raided by the city police. There are ten or a dozen regular hells located in the very heart of the city, a description of some of which may prove of interest. ”

“ I had always a perfect horror of gambling, and little imagined I was pursuing it in a wholesale manner. To satisfy my inordinate curiosity, for sight-seeing, I have twice or thrice in my life passed the threshhold of a gambling-house in London, but never felt the least personal desire to embark the smallest sum, although keenly alive to the dangerous excitement in others. ”

“ The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport.
It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public. ”

“ The unsuccessful gambler is one of the worst of wrecks. He runs his little course of dissipation, dishonesty, cheating and swindling. He is over-matched and eliminated by the bigger, keener, self-controlled gambler, who eats him up as the big spider eats up the little spider. Hanging around saloons, [Pg 360] begging for a little money with which to bet, doing the dirty work of the bigger gamblers—that is the fate of the little gambling cast-off. ”

“ Do not begin gaming as a relaxation, for it will soon become a business. Avoid pool-rooms, race-courses, faro banks, cockfights, policy shops, lotteries, raffles, betting 624of every form. All such things are perilous. Where one grows rich, one hundred grow poor, and the one who wins is poorest of all. No man is as pitiably poor as the man who has money won by gambling. This form of evil doing will tempt you everywhere, on rail train and steamboat, in hotels, clubs and barber shops ”

“ His gambling was a very trifle as far as money went: an affair of all but life and death as far as principle was concerned. There is nothing like the amount of in-door gambling that there used to be; but there is no great improvement in taking it to the downs and the open air, and making it librate on the muscles of horses instead of on the spinning power of a top or the turning up of cards. And whoever gambles, whether at rouge-et-noir or at Fly-away versus Staywell, will find that the laws of gambling are, like those of the universe, unalterable. ”

“ The third count in this black indictment is that gaming not only dethrones God and degrades man, but destroys the most blessed of all human institutions, the home.
Gamblers flock together as naturally as lean-necked vultures; they hunt in packs like coyotes, and intermingle like a knot of clammy vipers that crawl in the dank gloom of a sunless canyon. They have no share in the sweet sanctities of the fireside, and desire vehemently to be elsewhere. Even when the gamester sits at his own table, or embraces his own children, his heart is in another place. Physical contact is not intimacy. ”

“ A great many of our men naturally went to the Casino to behold the world-famous gambling tables, but if I ever had any worries about their squandering their earnings they quite disappeared. Many only watched at the outer edge, or else bet one chip very timidly. An aged harpy, who looked as though she had played at Monte Carlo since the time of Napoleon III and who kept a note-book of her losses and winnings and never bet less than a hundred francs at a time, took it upon herself to teach one of our talented young flute players how to play with one white chip. ”