What may be called gambling thieves are not so numerous in Chicago as in some other cities, for the reason that no race tracks are permitted to exist in Cook county. But there are many gambling swindlers in this city. A large proportion of the men in the county jail are there because gambling wrecked morals in them, and hardly a week passes that does not find at least one person before the courts charged with robbery because money was wanted to bet.
This is not all of the injury that gambling does to the community. Because the state's attorney's office and the police have not suppressed gambling the city is full of sharpers who make their living out of men foolish enough to think that they can get rich by betting on horse races, faro or roulette. These sharpers are an organized band of law breakers, preying on society, disorganizing it as far as is possible, their whole existence a menace to decency and order.
The passion for gambling can probably never be eradicated from human nature. But civilization should be able to prevent rogues and rascals from profiting by it in the way usual in Chicago. Professional gamblers—professional swindlers, should be sent to the penitentiary and kept there. There should be some means under the law to send all such to the penitentiary and keep them there.
How to End Race-Track Gambling.
Race-track gambling has unexpectedly become an issue of importance in New York, and widespread discussion of means to rid the city of its race tracks is taking place.
Discussion, however, is unnecessary. The way to end the plague of betting on races is plain. Let the grand jury indict officials of the Western Union Telegraph Company for complicity in bookmaking and send them to jail. Without gambling race tracks would be deserted. Without the aid of the Western Union there would be no gambling worth mentioning. Strike at the Western Union and the race tracks would go out of existence.
The Western Union Company is the one great encourager of gambling in this country. But for its reports of races, hundreds of thousands of young men would be saved from ruin every year. It is in partnership with sharpers who fleece the foolish. It shares their gains in payment for the use of its wires. The money that flows into its coffers from that source is taken by trickery from the public. The race track swindlers rob a man and hand over a part of their loot to the Western Union, because without the Western Union's assistance they could not have robbed him.
Do they think about us at home? We air having such a good time hear a lone.
But for the Western Union Telegraph Company not a single race track would be in operation in the United States, for without the Western Union's aid race tracks would not be profitable.