As the years passed the vice grew in magnitude. Large fortunes were made by the proprietors of gaming-houses, thanks to the methodized employment of capital, embarked regularly as in any other trading establishment, the invention of E. O. tables, and the introduction of the “foreign games of roulet and rouge et noir. Little short of a million must have been amassed in this way,”[148] individuals having acquired from £10,000 to £100,000 a-piece. The number of establishments daily multiplied. They were mounted regardless of expense. Open house
was kept, and luxurious dinners laid for all comers. Merchants and bankers’ clerks entrusted with large sums were especially encouraged to attend. The cost of entertainment in one house alone was £8000 for eight months, while the total expenditure on all as much as £150,000 a year. The gambling-house keepers, often prize-fighters originally, or partners admitted for their skill in card-sharping or cogging dice, possessed such ample funds that they laughed at legal prosecutions. Witnesses were suborned, officers of justice bribed, informers intimidated. Armed ruffians and bludgeon men were employed to barricade the houses and resist the civil power. Private competed with public hells. Great ladies of fashion, holding their heads high in the social world, made their drawing-rooms into gambling places, into which young men of means were enticed and despoiled. This was called “pidgeoning,” and probably originated the expression. The most noted female gamesters were Lady Buckinghamshire, Lady Archer, Lady Mount Edgecombe, a trio who had earned for themselves the soubriquet of “Faro’s Daughters.” Their conduct came under severe reprehension of Lord Kenyon, who, in summing up a gambling case, warned them that if they came before him in connection with gambling transactions, “though they should be the first ladies of the land,” they should certainly exhibit themselves in the pillory. This well-merited threat was reproduced in various caricatures of the day, under such heads as, “Ladies of Elevated Rank”; “Faro’s Daughters, Beware!” “Discipline à la Kenyon.”
The Government itself was in a measure responsible for the diffusion of the passion for gambling. The pernicious custom of public lotteries practically legalized this baneful vice. State lotteries began in the reign of Elizabeth, and existed down to 1826. They brought in a considerable revenue, but they did infinite mischief by developing the rage for speculation, which extended to the whole community. The rich could purchase whole tickets, or “great goes”; for the more impecunious the tickets were subdivided into “little goes.” Those who had no tickets at all could still gamble at the lottery insurance offices by backing any particular number to win. The demoralizition was widespread. It reached a climax in the South Sea bubble, when thousands and thousands were first decoyed, then cruelly deceived and beggared. But lotteries lingered on till the Government at length awoke to the degradation of obtaining an income from such a source.
While crime thus stalked rampant through the land, the law was nearly powerless to grapple and check it. It had practically but one method of repression—the wholesale removal of convicted offenders to another world. Of prevention as we understand it our forefathers had but little idea. The metropolis, with its ill-paved, dimly-lighted streets, was without police protection beyond that afforded by a few feeble watchmen, the sorely-tried and often nearly useless “Charlies.” The administration of justice was defective; the justices had not sufficient powers; they were frequently “as regardless of the law as ignorant of it,”[149] or else were defied by pettifoggers and people with money in their pockets. “A mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves, are almost too big for the civil authority to repress;”[150] and the civil power generally, according to Fielding, was in a lethargic state. Yet private enterprise had sought for some time past to second the efforts of the State, and various societies for the reformation of manners laboured hard, but scarcely with marked success, to reduce crime. The first of these societies originated in the previous century by six private gentlemen, whose hearts were moved by the dismal and desperate state of the country “to engage in the difficult and dangerous enterprise;” and it was soon strengthened by the addition of “persons of eminency in the law, members of Parliament, justices of the peace, and considerable citizens of London of known abilities and great integrity.” There was a second society of about fifty persons, tradesmen, and others; and a third society of constables, who met to consider how they might best discharge their oaths; a fourth to give information; while other bodies of householders and officers assisted in the great work. These in one year, that of 1724, had prosecuted 2723 persons, and in the thirty-three years preceding 89,393; while in the same period they had given away 400,000 good books. However well meant and well directed were these efforts, it is to be feared that they were of little avail in stemming the torrent of crime which long continued to deluge the country, and which has far from abated even now.
The character of offences perpetrated will best be understood by passing from the general to the particular, and briefly indicating the salient points of a certain number of typical cases, all of which were in some way or other connected with Newgate. Crime was confined to no one class; while the lowest robbed with brutal violence, members of the highest stabbed and murdered each other on flimsy pretences, or found funds for debauchery in systematic and cleverly contrived frauds. Life was held very cheap in those days. Every one with any pretensions carried a sword, and appealed to it on the slightest excuse or