These observed and calculated results establish the following interesting rule:—In matters of pure luck, about two-thirds of any given number of persons will come out substantially even, in any large number of trials; of the remaining third, about one-half will be noticeably lucky, and the remaining one-half noticeably unlucky. Thus, of six who venture, four will have no special fortune, good or bad; one will be quite “in vein”; one quite “out of vein.”
Suppose the players are thirty-six, and we select the lucky six, and pit them against each other, as in “progressive” games; the same law will hold good, one coming out noticeably better, one noticeably worse than the
rest; and so on indefinitely, the number of the extremes diminishing at the rate of six to one at each new trial.
This is the Law of Luck; but it is obvious that it leaves luck, good and bad, a real fact; and among a million men, or in a great city like New York or London, we must find extraordinary examples of “sequences,” both of the favors and the frowns of fortune; not in gambling only, but in those thousands of accidental events which make up the welfare or misery of personal experience.
All the moralists I have read on the subject seem to blink and stagger at this obvious and necessary conclusion,—that the history of many individuals is and must be enormously controlled, in spite of any efforts of their own, by pure luck. In cutting the cards twenty times in succession, about twenty people in a million will cut red every time and another twenty will cut black every time; and so it will be with all other matters of pure chance in life. There is no use in trying to dodge this certain result of a sum in simple division. We must count it in, in all plans and calculations for success and happiness in our individual life.
The important question is, what value must we assign to it?
Here is where men make several frequent and disastrous errors.
The most common is an error in arithmetic which the little I have above said on the calculus of chance should be enough to correct. It is putting faith in their good luck,
or falling into discouragement from their bad luck. Each is equally silly. A sequence of any kind of luck does not offer the slightest presumption that it will continue. The chances remain precisely as at the beginning, and are about six to one against the continuance of either extreme in the same individual. In matters of pure chance no sustained coincidence in either direction adds the least probability to its continuance. This is what is so difficult for men to believe; and so it comes about that faith in good luck is the source of most bad luck. A “run of good luck” has wrecked the lives of more men than has the repetition of disasters.
The reason for this is easily shown. The general rule in life is that a man’s prosperity is conditioned closely by the amount and kind of his knowledge, and his skill in the use of it. But the man who “trusts to luck” distinctly renounces the advantages of knowledge, and builds his hopes on his acknowledged impotence to influence the results. He abandons himself to the current of events, and makes no effort to look forward and see whether it will suck him into a whirlpool, or land him on some sunny shore. Scarcely any state of mind could be fraught with greater peril to his future.