RUIN, PRISON OR DEATH, THE GAMBLER’S END.
Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors.
The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality.
The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. You cannot beat it, in the long run, no matter what your talents, judgment and experience may be.
The average man or woman would stand a fair show of winning in the average gambling game in Chicago were that game “on the square.” But it is not; the entire system is crooked. That is how its profits are enormous.
The thousands of persons who play the handbooks during the day, the poker games and other forms of the gambling evil at night, have no more choice of emerging with the “long green” bulging from every pocket than has the mouse that is caught by the soft-pawed cat in a room and played with until tired and then killed. There is no escape. Everything is crooked and the gambling sucker is dubbed the “bleating sheep” the minute he enters where the chips rattle on the table or where the man with the dirty dollar smears your name on a chart with a stub pencil.
Each year hundreds of men and women end their blasted lives after they have emerged from the dens of the gambling lords, robbed of their last cent and face to face with ruin, disgrace, and punishment.
Each year, men are sent to our state prisons because they dipped their trembling hands into the gold in their employers’ till to make up the money the gambling fraternity had taken from them.
Each year, hundreds of women see their homes crumble beneath them, stand with tear-stained eyes and watch their social positions taken from them, lose the love and protection of their husbands and are turned adrift to stray into the hell houses we have described, because the gambling germ was imbedded and flourished in their blood and drove them on to unnameable ruin.
There is no way of estimating the evils consequent on the vice of gambling as it exists in Chicago today.