If all who have been ruined in temporal and eternal things by it could rise and walk in sad procession through the land, the spectacle would appal the stoutest heart. If all the names of the men undone by this art could be written on the cards used to-day in gaming, every one would be signed across with the blood-red autograph of a doomed soul.
The fountains of Monaco seem to drip tears, and in the odorous shrubbery the wind sighs like the echo of the last cry of the bond slave led captive from its sinks of sin. Were it not for the stupifying spell gambling throws on all its thralls, the licentious associations and scrofulous surroundings of the play might stir the soul to escape from its condemnation. Fathers have wept over lost sons; tender children over disgraced fathers, downcast sisters have beseechingly invoked vengeance on a brother’s destroyers, and wives with little ones clinging to their skirts have implored with tearful eloquence the gamester to break the bonds that held him. All in vain. He mingles with the moral refuse of the land, plunges deeper in degradation, becomes an inmate in these habitations of cruelty, and with all the pith and marrow of mankind sucked out, with blood poisoned and bone rotted, he consorts with drunken sailors, filthy women and skulking vagrants, playing with unsteady hand for the few coins he can gather, till death with the besom of a nameless disease sweeps his foul carcass into the pauper’s grave.
Of all men, he seems to me the most spectral and bloodless, the most effectually blighted and paralyzed. How the virtuous person shrinks from one who is pointed out as a gambler. If you wish to see what nature thinks of this vice, look into his face. Women of fair fame shun him. Children avoid him on the street, and men pass him with averted faces. Burns, in his strange poem of “Tam O’Shanter,” tells how the tipsy hero peers into “Alloways auld haunted kirk,” and watches the witches’ unearthly dance, taking note of what lay upon the holy table. Surely ’tis a chilling catalogue as he writes it:
“A murderer’s bones in gibbet irons,
Two span-long wee unchristened bairns
A garter which a babe had strangled,
A knife a father’s throat had mangled
Whose own son had him of life bereft,
The gray hair yet stuck to the heft.”
Now fancy another son of this murdered father using this bloody knife as a plaything. Such the cards used in gaming seem to me—hideously stained with the blood of loved ones, and I would as soon think of rattling the handles of my baby’s coffin for music, as shuffling the cards for pleasure. I can appreciate the feeling of that man who was one of a shipload of passengers wrecked on the Atlantic coast some five years ago. In the bitter freezing night they clung to the rigging, and when about to let go and die, one put his hand in his pocket and took out the cards they had been playing with and tossed them into the angry sea, saying, “Boys, I don’t want to go into the presence of God with a deck of cards in my pocket.” More than one “happy couple” have I married only to see the wife deserted that the husband might throw their all into the whirlpool of chance. More than one little home have I seen engulfed in this maelstrom. Many a servant cheats his master, many an employe robs his employer; many a wife abstracts part of her husband’s earnings, thus breeding domestic strife, to cast it all into the coffers of the lottery or the policy shop.