Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

It must be understood in the few remarks I purpose to offer on this subject, that I confine them to what I have called the habit of betting. I shall not affirm that betting is necessarily a sin, but I do state it as my conviction that its tendency and results are practically always in that direction. William Cobbett—than whom no man has ever written more sensibly to young men—says that "betting is always criminal in itself, or in what it leads to. The root of it is covetousness, a desire to take from others something for which you have given, and intend to give, no equivalent." These statements may be debated, but they appeal to me as essentially sound. A young man says: "If I choose to risk a sum of money which I can afford to lose over a bet with some one else who can afford to do the same, what has talk about equivalent got to do with it? What, or where, is the wrong in such a transaction?" This is a test question, and I am disposed to answer it by saying that I do not think any young man who takes himself seriously will urge it; and when put on a lower plane, the closer you examine it the more rotten it is found to be. Is it wrong to cultivate and indulge a habit that inevitably leads to bad results? And that is what betting does, apologize for it as you may. Putting aside for the moment any considerations about the money you can afford to lose, you cannot afford, either in your own or in the interests of the community of which you are a part, to take the moral risks that are involved in betting. It is to insult our intelligence to deny that, comprehensively speaking, the basis of betting is cupidity, and cupidity of a particularly dangerous kind. There may be exceptions, but they are scarcely worth mentioning; whatever may be the inception of the habit of betting, it almost inevitably roots itself as greed; and it is greed that consumes character like a furnace. It is the black altar on which everything worth being must suffer immolation.

I was told some time ago of a place of worship which had a billiard-table on its premises. Provided at the suggestion of the minister with the best of intentions, it was soon turned into a means of betting. The managers were obliged to take the matter into serious consideration, and out of a regard to the susceptibilities of the young men who used the table, they decided not to prohibit stakes upon a game, but to insist that all winnings should be handed over to the Hospital Fund. The room was soon comparatively deserted. The interest was not billiards, so much as billiards plus the money won or lost in betting on billiards.

When I am told that to stake a trifle upon a game is not for the sake of winning money, so much as to give the due seasoning of excitement to amusement, I have to remark that in a few cases this may be so, but it is not the explanation of betting. Almost entirely it comes to mean the desire to win money for which we have given, and intend to give, no just equivalent. That almost deserted room on the church premises tells the truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a flourishing one, without working for it—a greatly coveted science in these days. It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this way, than by honest toil with head or hands, or both. The notorious fact that betting strikes at the root-principle of worthy and strenuous labour, is not the least of the vicious features of this many-sided evil.

It also creates the most hopeless form of selfishness, and it grows by what it feeds on. The avarice of betting destroys the best part of us. As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers Nature like a rotten branch."

To my thinking, it is a waste of time to ask, and it is an abuse of time to discuss the question, wherein the wrong or evil of betting consists. The practice has evil consequences, and evil consequences only; and they necessarily become the more evil the more widely it is diffused throughout society. What other proof of wrong does a right-minded person ask? My estimate of the effects of betting is such that I would neither employ nor trust any man who is addicted to it.

I hope and believe that I am talking to young men who have never touched this dangerous thing. Continue to be wise. Others, it may be, have ventured a little way. My message to you is, turn away from it, another step may make retreat impossible. As you value the things that rightly enter into life for attainment and possession—honest enterprise, true success, worthy ambition, upright character, peace of mind, and hopefulness of outlook—bind these words about your neck, write them upon the table of your heart: "He that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."

And once more, we may defile the temple of the body by Drunkenness. Or if this term, and the state it connotes, be unduly aggressive, let me say by an intemperate use of strong drink.

There are those who tell us that any use which passes it through the lips is intemperate. If I offer a word of criticism on this position, it is because I want the assent of your reason in the few things I have to say about this part of the subject before us. The first condition of permanent reform is, that it shall be founded on truth. The peculiar temptation, it has been said, of the ardent reformer is to exaggerate. Intense feeling is apt to build upon a half-truth—the unsafest of all foundations. It is one thing to insist upon the evils that are inseparable from an intemperate indulgence in strong drink, it is quite another thing to assert that it is evil, and evil only, to touch it at all. The latter order of polemic is always liable to bring about a reaction which is terribly prejudicial to the good we desire to accomplish.

I have no warrant to question a man's loyalty to the forward movements of our time, who conscientiously for the sake of health, as he thinks, or social arrangements, cannot recognize it as his duty to forswear drink altogether. When a man claims his liberty to be the arbiter of his habits in his home, or in society, for me to arrogate the right to censure him may be impertinence; and, so far as I am concerned, to read him out of Christian consistency may be to make myself, as St. James puts it, a judge of evil thoughts. When a man has reached fifty years of age, and has worked hard and lived sparingly, if he should consider it advisable to relax somewhat the severities of earlier years, I have nothing to say to him unless it be to remind him of the example he owes to others, and of the need there always is to keep before us the warning: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."

I think it right to put this side of the question in its just evidence, and having done so I willingly dismiss it with the remark that I am not talking to middle-aged nor to old men. My appeal is to young men, and I say to you without qualification, without a suspicion of mental reservation, you do not need strong drink. There are conceivable circumstances where it may be medically prescribed, but such prescription from competent men has well-nigh reached the vanishing-point. Near as any statement can get to its ultimate, I affirm that you never have need of this drink. Keep it, then, out of your blood in your threshold years, and you will have less or no craving for it at all in those that are travelling your way. If you should imagine that you inherit the craving, there is, at any rate, one rampart which, if held, the craving cannot force—that is, total abstinence from the thing craved. Range yourselves with the abstainers, and be proud of your legion. It will be better for you in every way, whether it be in physical health, mental efficiency, moral force, or spiritual attainment. Settle it with yourselves, that there are no conditions in your life which can be called normal, and few that are abnormal, where you need the drink, and that to trifle with a thing so unnecessary, and yet so dangerous, is moral idiocy.