Betting & Gambling: A National Evil

by Unknown

I

Almost every observer to-day agrees that betting has reached colossal proportions and is still increasing. At the street corner, in the newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop, in the barber’s saloon, in the club, in the public-house, in the factory, the bookmaker or his agent is ready to receive the money of men, women, and children, and victims of the habit are at hand to lead astray the novices still uninitiated in the worship of the seductive goddess.

The chief characteristic of the present outburst of the gambling habit is that it is becoming a class disease. People of experience seem to be pretty much agreed that those living on the marginal line of poverty and those on the marginal line of respectability are specially liable to fall victims to the habit. Both of these classes have in common a feeling that their lives are profoundly unsatisfactory. The dreary drudgery of the life of a wage-earner who oscillates between 15s. and 25s. a week, with an occasional turn of nothing at all; the unsatisfied craving in the life of a man too proud to take his place amongst the working classes but too poor and despised to be received in professional ranks—can only lead astray those doomed to them.

To both of these marginal groups the mental excitement and pecuniary allurements of “trying their luck” are almost irresistible, and, though they join in nothing else and in every other respect are poles asunder, they go together to throw their coppers before Fortuna lest haply she may return them favours an hundredfold.

That, I take it, is the most significant feature of the present spread of gambling. It is the evidence of social failure showing itself in the conduct of social groups or classes. It therefore flourishes with other disquieting symptoms, such as the inordinate love of spectacular effect, the demand for mere amusement, the distaste for serious and strenuous effort, the spread of drunkenness—all pointing to a poverty of personality, a bareness of the inner chambers of the mind, occurring in such a way as to indicate that we are faced not merely with the moral breakdown of isolated individuals but with the results of a serious failure on the part of society. We have to deal not merely with individual lapses but with a social disease. From that point of view this paper is written.

Much has been written upon the gambling motive, and I am not sure that the final word has yet been said upon it. Certainly the simple explanations of it as a “sin” do not meet the facts of the case. Avarice does not explain it, because the avaricious do not risk fortunes on the turn of a wheel or the tip of a stableman. And yet avarice enters into the gambler’s character. The pleasure of possessing does not explain it, because if every gambler were to be made as rich as Crœsus he would gamble the more. I am inclined to believe that the workman gambles to charm ennui away from his doorstep, and having begun he goes on partly in the hope that he will recoup himself for his losses, partly to continue keeping ennui away. Roughly, the same motives influence the other gambling class—the clerks and the other wage receivers who would fain believe that they are paid “salaries.”[2]

But the particular character of the disease which is bred by the social circumstances of these classes is determined by the law of imitation. As we used to imitate Milan in our millinery and Paris in our dresses, so for our habits there is a class to which we look. If those habits are of the nature of luxuries, we borrow and adapt them from the luxurious classes, and having thus become indebted to these classes we associate our wellbeing with theirs. A parasitic feeling is engendered, and this feeling in turn strengthens the original motive which started us upon our imitative course. Thus we move downwards in a vicious spiral. We must therefore trace the vigour of the present gambling disease not merely to the failure of society to satisfy the appetite for life gnawing unsatisfied at the hearts of whole classes, but to the active existence elsewhere in the same community of sections of idle rich.

Gambling is a disease which spreads downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich. In its most common form, betting on horse-racing, it is the only way in which the outcast plebeians can be joined with their betters in a bond of freemasonry. An elevating knowledge of distinguished jockeys and an exhilarating acquaintance with the pedigree of horses raise the poor parasite to the level of the rich one and make them both men and brothers. One has to go to some famous horse-racing event to appreciate fully the meaning and the force of this.

Consequently, we should expect theoretically to find the gambling habit amongst the poor break out into chronic virulence at a time when the idle rich had received some sudden accession in strength, and when they were blazing forth into a new brilliance of vicious habit. Is not that the case to-day? Did not the serious spread of gambling downwards coincide with a renewal of the splendours of our non-productive, luxurious rich?

Within recent years this class has undoubtedly increased in power, and with that, as has always happened in history, its morals have been degraded. Those who ought to know tell us that not since the days when Brooke’s was in its glory and Frederick was waiting with impatient anxiety for the death of his demented parent, George III., was gambling so prevalent and personal vice so common in society as it is to-day. I have heard on most excellent authority of several thousands of pounds changing hands during an after-dinner game of bridge, at a house which was not the haunt of prodigals, and amongst people who would be insulted if they were called gamblers; certain circles of men and women not very far removed from the centre of political life, who a few years ago spent their spare energies in investigating the mysteries of theosophy and dabbling in the weird, have now turned with absorbing interest to the ubiquitous card game, and guests who do not join in the gamble—often the swindle—find themselves unprotected by the manners which held a guest as sacred.[3]

The sudden flood of easily gotten wealth which came mainly as a result of the exploitation of South Africa, and also partly in consequence of the financier acquiring control of trade by the development of the large over-capitalised syndicate, has not only created a new Park Lane, a nouveau riche and therefore a vulgar one, but has brought in its train a low personal and social morality, and has created in our society purple patches of decadence which can be placed alongside the rotting luxuriance of the Roman Empire. It was so in France when Law’s financial schemes set everybody dreaming of an age of gold and paper money; it was so with ourselves when the South Sea Bubble was being blown up; it will always be so under like circumstances. The influence spreads from one end of society to the other. It colours our newspapers. The tinsel spectacle excites the imagination of the common man or woman. Our charities and philanthropies hang upon the trains of luxurious vulgarity.[4] In a subtle way the grossness at the top percolates through to the bottom, and the plebeian in his own special heavy-footed style dances to the same sensuous tune to which the feet of his betters are more daintily tripping. From the vicious social conditions at the top the gambling impulse finds its way to the bottom. Imitation of the upper classes, even in the most democratic of societies,—and ours is far from that,—continues to have an important influence in the life of the people. Such is the origin of the disease. We must now consider some of its effects.