Conclusion
In conclusion, it may be said that when such time arrives the conviction will also be held by the people of the United Kingdom that the professional gambler in the stock and produce markets, whose operations it is not always possible to challenge as being entirely unconnected with commerce, should at least have his huge dealings hampered by a pro rata tax, the incidence of which would not interfere with bona fide purchases and sales; that our police forces must be saved from becoming as corrupt as Tammany Hall through bookmakers’ bribes, to which several of them are well on the way; that the great Department of the Post Office must not continue to swell its revenues by using its organisation to assist the corrupt business of betting, even granting it special facilities, whatever may be alleged to the contrary—in particular, with regard to the telegraphic service, in which overt temptations to the servants in its employ are continually resulting in its having to prosecute them in batches, notably the younger ones among them, in the name of public morality, but practically for the protection of this bookmaking system which the Post Office, as its intermediary for deposits, assists and fosters in its work of breeding criminals and cheating fools; and finally that those individuals who, without the vestige of any mercantile basis, prey upon the credulity and vices of their fellow-countrymen should be looked upon as hostes humani generis, so that the bookmakers shall be treated as criminals and punished, not by fines but by imprisonment.
Then, perhaps, also, the habitual private gambler of means and position will find every public career and honour withheld from him, and this great Christian nation will approach the plane of morality now occupied in this respect by our allied heathen empire of Japan.