Deal with your Quaking friends—They’re men of light,
The spirit hates deceit and scorns to bite.’
“The Company for the insurance of horses’ lives against death, or accident, is thus dealt with:
‘You that keep horses to preserve your ease,
And pads to please your wives and mistresses,
Insure their lives, and, if they die we’ll make
Full satisfaction—or be bound to break.’
“Smallett[Smallett] gives us a more dismal picture. ‘The whole nation,’ he says, ‘was infested with a spirit of stock-jobbing, to an astonishing degree. All distinctions of party, religion, sex, character, and circumstances were swallowed up. Exchange-alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, Whigs, and Tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with females. All other professions and employments were utterly neglected.’
“It is not to be wondered at that various lottery schemes were started and prospered immensely at a time when the public mind was in the state indicated above. They were launched by the State, by private companies and by individuals. These institutions played no small part in the general debasement of the public mind and the ruin of fortunes and families.” This will appear more fully in the treatment accorded to lotteries elsewhere in this book.
The history of anti gambling legislation in England, and the various efforts which have been made to suppress or regulate the vice forms an interesting phase of the subject, and also suggests how the evil was regarded from time to time in the public mind. The earliest legislation on the subject appears to have been based on the idea, not that gambling was immoral and degrading, but that it interfered with the usefulness[usefulness] of servants and employes, induced idleness, and diverted attention from archery. “The first statute (12 R. 2, c. 6) in England (1388) prohibiting gambling, applied only to servants of husbandry, artificers, and victuallers—not to servants of gentlemen—and commanded such to refrain from ‘hand and foot ball, quoits, dice, throwing of stone kayles, and such other importune games.’ The next statute (1409) enforced the above, with a penalty of six days imprisonment for such offence. The next act (17 Ed. 4, c. 3, 1477,) after naming in a preamble the foregoing games, says, ‘Contrary to such laws, games called kayles, half-bowles, hand-in-hand-out, and queckeborde, from day to day are used in divers parts of the land,’ then provides that no occupier or master of a house shall voluntarily permit any prohibited person to play at any such game in said house, under pain of three years’ imprisonment and forfeiture of £20 for each offense. No prohibited person could play under pain of two years’ imprisonment and £10 default. Another act (11 H. 7, c. 2, 1494,) provided that no artificer, laborer or servant should play any unlawful game except at Christmas, while the law (19 H. 7, c, 12) of 1503, absolutely prohibited certain persons named therein from playing at any game. In 1511, (3 H. 8, c. 3) unlawful games were again prohibited, and a still more stringent law enacted in 1535 (22 H. 8, c. 35).