Many a bucket shop commission merchant would hardly know wheat from oats, and none of their grain and produce "exchanges" ever had a sample bag on its counters. Their transactions are wagers and their existence is an incitement to gambling under the guise of commercial transactions. The pernicious influences of the gaming house are, in the bucket shop, surrounded by the allurement of a cloak of respectability and the assumption of business methods.
The legitimate exchange is a huge time and labor saving machine. Its benefits are universal. While its privileges are valuable they have been rendered so only by hard work, and its members are entitled to the protection of the state against thieves. The "bucket shop" is a thief. The quotations upon which the "bucket shop" trades are the product of the labor and intelligence and information of the exchange. The exchange gathers its news at great cost from all over the globe and disseminates it for public advantage. But its quotations should be its own property. They are the direct product of its energy, its foresight and its business sagacity.
The "bucket shop," at no parallel cost, usurps the functions of the exchange and endeavors to secure for itself the returns for a labor performed by others. Were it to use honorable methods with its patrons it would be a dishonorable institution. Using the methods it does, the "bucket shop" is twice dishonored.
As a matter of fact, all other forms of gambling or swindling are commonplace and comparatively innocent when compared to the "bucket shop" which has caused more moral wrecks, more dismantled fortunes and made more of the innocent suffer than any other agency of diabolism. Just why so brazen an iniquity in the guise of speculation should be allowed to exist it is difficult to explain.
Open Gambling Under Ban.
Open gambling has been placed under the ban of civic reform. While the policy shop, the lottery and other less dangerous methods of swindling have been effectively stamped out of most cities, the "bucket shop tiger" continues to rend the ambitions of young and old, dragging them down to forgery, embezzlement, suicide,—or that which is quite as bad,—broken spirit for legitimate endeavor. Under the circumstances the sympathy of the public should be with the movement to drive "bucket shops" out of business, to close them along with all other gambling institutions.
It is time that something was done to check the growing evil of gambling on produce, cotton and stock exchange quotations. A beginning has been made, but the movement has not gone far enough. These excrescences on the body politic have multiplied rapidly and so dangerously near do they come to being popular that the mercantile community owes it to itself to apply the knife at once.
Moreover, there is no form of gambling more disastrous to the player than "bucket shop" gambling. Its semi-respectability and likeness in many outward features to regular and reputable commission houses makes it the most insidious of all temptations to the young speculator and aspirant for wealth. It is the open door to ruin.
THAT NEW LEAF