THE HANDBOOK EVIL AND ITS GRAFT.
There exist in Chicago 1,000 handbooks.
A handbook, for the benefit of the unsophisticated reader, is a record made in a local place of horse races which are being run off at a distance. As for instance, a cigar store in the loop district makes bets on races which are being run off at Jacksonville, Florida.
The handbooks are run in saloons, cigar stores, hotels, and on newsstands. Here the dollars of the sucker patrons are drawn from their pockets as by magic, turned over to the agents of the gambling trust, never to return. Clerks, stenographers, office boys, all classes of salaried men and women are the victims of the handbook habit in Chicago.
Day after day this unseeing public scratches its head of “solid ivory,” puzzles its brain in desperation and goes out to “beat” the combination that never has known a real defeat.
Barnum said “there is one sucker born every minute.” Truly there is. The birth statistics of the Chicago sucker, male and female, mostly male, is greater than the birth rate of innocent children. This is a queer world.