II
If gambling comes from a poisoned source, it poisons the life with which it is in touch. Other writers in this volume are dealing with the personal and family disasters for which it is responsible. I confine my attention to its influence upon citizenship, upon the persons upon whose intelligence and character rests the fabric of the State and the community.
The gambling disease is marked by a moral and intellectual unsettlement, by an impatience with the slow processes of legitimate accumulation, by a revolt against the discipline of steady growth and sustained action. The gambler lives in a state of unnatural strain. Like an insane person, he stands on the threshold of a grandiose world the high lights of which throw the sober realities of the real into shadow. Moreover, his vice develops the self-regarding instincts into hideous and criminal proportions. What is all this but saying that it cuts away the roots of good citizenship. For good citizenship depends upon a moral discipline which enables a man to pursue, undisturbed by outward event, calm amidst storms of fortune, some desirable social end; it is dependent upon the development of the social conscience in the individual; it flourishes only when men seek after the more solid gains which come from honest work and faithful endeavour. The people to whom the gains of life are but the prize-winnings of a game of hazard, who flock to spectacles, whose sports consist of looking on whilst professionals display their prowess, are but decaying props of State.
Individualists would make us believe that citizenship is not part of personality, for otherwise their antithesis of man versus the State would be inconceivable. But the antithesis is purely verbal, and does not in reality exist. Man’s personality is complex, but it is a unit; his public and private actions may be many sided, and for a time may spring from opposing moral sources, but in the end their exercise blends the opposing sources and changes the individuality. For instance, no people can rule itself democratically at home and govern other peoples autocratically abroad. The home democracy in time becomes tainted. The moral sources of one system become blended with the polluted sources of the other. And so it is with the character of the man and the citizen. The citizen cannot act contrary to the man.
One need hardly trouble to appeal to history to prove these statements. A parallel between our present state of society, rotting with luxury and intoxicated with excitement, and the Roman Empire in the days of its decline is on every moralist’s lips and is becoming hackneyed. Philip of Macedon, it is said, encouraged gambling amongst the Greeks, on the ground that it corrupted their minds and made them docile under his rule. From time to time in our own country the gambling mania has become chronic, the last of these outbursts being about a century ago, when Brooke’s and White’s stripped their foolish victims, and when the flick of cards was heard throughout the abodes of fashion. Of that time Sir George Trevelyan writes:—
The political world, then as always, was no better than the individuals who composed it. Private vices were reflected in the conduct of public affairs; and the English people suffered, and suffers still, because, at a great crisis in our history, a large proportion among our rulers and councillors had been too dissolute and prodigal to be able to afford a conscience.[5]
The gamblers were in power. There was plenty of party but little politics, and what politics there was was largely an art of recouping gaming losses from the public purse. Public life was saved only by the political overthrow of the gambling aristocracy. Fox, possessing though he did a genius which could throw off the taint of his circumstances, failed mainly owing to his lack of steadiness, dignity, prudence, and industry,[6] and these were precisely the deficiencies which his gambling habits would accentuate. They are the moral and intellectual results of gambling, and follow it as inevitably as gout follows wine-bibbing.
Those of us who fail to see any road leading to a desirable state of society save the political one, those who still believe that democracy is the only form of government under which men can enjoy the blessings of full citizenship, those who consider that in spite of the likes or dislikes of ruling classes government tends to depend more and more upon the sanction of the common people and thus becomes an ever more accurate reflection of their character, can view only with alarm the rapid spread of gambling habits amongst the masses. Where these habits prevail the newspaper, which should be the guide of the citizen, is read not for its politics but for its tips, for the racing news printed in the “fudge,” not for the subjects it discusses in its leader columns, and so is degraded to being the organ of the bookmaker. This does not merely mean an extension of its sporting columns, but a revolution in its tone and its staff, in response to what really becomes a revolution in its functions. Men who are too weary to think, too overworked to attend political meetings or take positions of responsibility in their trade unions, can nevertheless speak authoritatively about the pedigree of an obscure horse and the record of a second-rate footballer.
This, like all other backward steps to a lower stage of moral effort, is easy. For social conduct is the inheritance of complicated experiences, retained only by sleepless vigilance, and exercised by the subordination of the individual will to the social conscience. It is therefore comparable to those high forms of chemical compounds built up of many atoms but exceedingly unstable. The simple presence of a disturbing element shatters the compound and reduces it to its primitive atoms. Man’s self-regarding and primitive instincts are constantly threatening to disjoint his social character and defeat all movements depending upon that character for their success. To hope, for instance, that a labour party can be built up in a population quivering from an indulgence in games of hazard is folly. Such a population cannot be organised for sustained political effort, cannot be depended upon for legal support to its political champions, cannot respond to appeals to its rational imagination. Its hazards absorb so much of its leisure; they lead it away from thoughts of social righteousness; they destroy in it the sense of social service; they create in it a state of mind which believes in fate, luck, the irrational, the erratic; they dazzle its eyes with flashing hopes; they make it, in other words, absolutely incapable of taking an interest in the methods and the aims of reforming politicians. They lay it open to the seductions of the demagogue, to the blandishments of the hail-fellow-well-met type of candidate, to the inducements of the common briber, to the flashy clap-trap of the vulgar and the ignorant charlatan. And the discovery that such classes exist in the community will very soon be made, and the whole tone of public life lowered to suit their tastes. It is not without serious significance that in recent elections one of the most common forms of argument (sometimes used by both sides) has been an offer by the candidates to back up statements they had made by sums of money. “It is not so much,” says Loria, the eminent Italian sociologist, “the personality of the elected as the character of the class which elects that really counts.” I do not say that this is to lead to rapid and irretrievable ruin. Rome bore the burden of a luxurious and gambling class of citizens for centuries. But I do say that the spread of the gambling habit is one of the most disquieting events of the time for those particularly who believe in self-government and in an intelligent democracy using its political power to secure moral and social ends. Every labour leader I know recognises the gambling spirit as a menace to any form of labour party.