There Is No Such Thing As An Honest Gambler—Suicides Are Common—Gambling Kings Go Broke, and Often Die in the Poorhouse—It Is a Hard, Cold, Brutal Road the Gambler Travels—It Ends Badly.
We do not believe that many young men DELIBERATELY take up the gambler's career. They drift into it through weakness, temptation or accident. If any young man DOES imagine that in the gambler's life he can find more money, less work and more happiness than in honest living and honest work, he is the victim of a dangerous delusion.
A most miserable creature is the gambler. He knows himself, and therefore he hates himself.
No man can gamble and be honest, even with his friends, even with his family. The idea of the gambler is to get from another man what he has not earned from that man, giving nothing in exchange. And when a man spends his time trying to get away the money of others with no return he soon drifts into throwing aside ALL honesty, even the gambler's brand.
The unsuccessful gambler is one of the worst of wrecks. He runs his little course of dissipation, dishonesty, cheating and swindling. He is over-matched and eliminated by the bigger, keener, self-controlled gambler, who eats him up as the big spider eats up the little spider. Hanging around saloons, begging for a little money with which to bet, doing the dirty work of the bigger gamblers—that is the fate of the little gambling cast-off. He is not worth talking about.
THE FOOLISHLY HAPPY LIFE.
Artist Palenske herewith forcefully presents the lamentable contrast of the man who delights to play poker when his boon companions call, and his other self when the wife pitifully and hopelessly pleads for money to meet household expenses. The "poker fiend" will lose his week's wages in a night. Sometimes, to boot, he loses money not his own, but he thinks it the part of the "game sport" if he hides his misfortunes behind the mask of a smile. "Be a good loser" is his never-failing motto. In the long run it is the neglected wife and family that are the REAL LOSERS.
The gambler's life is simply the life of a criminal. And, like every other successful criminal, the successful gambler has got to work very hard. What the burglar gets, what the pickpocket gets, what the gambler gets, is money painfully accumulated. The successful burglar, or pickpocket, or gambler must work hard and be forever on the alert. He must be remorselessly cruel in taking money from those that cannot stand the loss. He must be indifferent to all sense of decency, for he knows that he is robbing women and children.
The criminal in ANY line, gambler or other, cannot be a self-indulgent man if he is to be successful. The young man who imagines that the gambler's life is a gay and easy one is badly mistaken. If he tries it he will live to envy ANY honest man who has a right to look other men in the face.