Tom Duncombe was one of the high-flyers of his day. He was heir to an income of more than £12,000 a year but he anticipated the whole of it before he was thirty. His father, at one time, intending to pay off the debts contracted by his reckless son, caused a schedule of them to be made and it was found that they aggregated £135,000. He increased them to a still larger amount before he finished his career.
The cases of Lords Halifax, Anglesey[Anglesey] and Shaftesbury, and hundreds of others might be referred to were it necessary, to show how great havoc the passion for play has caused in the English aristocracy. But it is not necessary. Enough has been said to point a moral, it would seem, that all cannot but heed.
PART II.
GAMBLING IN THE NEW WORLD.
It may be questioned whether any other country on the globe affords a more striking illustration of the prevalence and the power of the gambling mania than does the great Republic of the North American Continent. Nor are the reasons far to seek. Hereditary titles of nobility are not recognized by the American constitution. In the general scramble for position and power, wealth counts for more in the United States than in any other land under the blue vaulted dome of Heaven.
At the same time it should not be supposed that an insane desire to accumulate fortunes lies at the root of American gaming. The hard, practical common sense of the average Yankee convinces him that he is not likely to win a competence at the green cloth. A large majority of American gamesters (i. e., local, as distinguished from professional) gamble because their brains are in a constant whirl of excitement. Rest has no charms for them; they seek recreation in the substitution of one form of mental stimulant for another. The “operator” on the exchange, whose days are spent in watching the rise and fall of commodities purely speculative, finds the ordinary paths of life too quiet, too monotonous, to elicit more than a passing thought. From the moment when he leaves “the floor” until he returns to it next day, his brain is in a mad whirl of excitement. What more natural than that he should seek relief for an overtaxed mind through exchanging one avenue of activity for another?
The application of these remarks, however, cannot be confined to “stock-jobbers” and manipulators of “corners.” The same spirit pervades all classes of society. This accursed thirst for gold—sacra auri fames—enters every American home, as the serpent insinuated his wiles into the Garden of Eden, and destroys at once domestic happiness and individual peace. The mechanic stakes and loses his week’s wages; the clerk risks his month’s salary; the husband and father ventures upon the turn of a card the money which should be devoted to the support of wife and children. Yet, as has been said, this reckless improvidence cannot be ascribed solely to a hope of acquiring rapid gains. The feeling of dissatisfaction with his condition which lurks in the breast of the average American, leads him, insensibly to himself, into all sorts of rash excesses, among which is gambling at cards.
American gambling, however, presents some distinctively characteristic features. In the first place it is mainly conducted on the floor of the exchange, rather than in public gaming rooms. The Stock and Produce Exchanges are sapping the very vitals of the country’s morality. For “stakes” are substituted “margins;” for “winnings” read “profits;” while the designation of “players” is changed into the more euphonious appellation of “speculators.” With these changes in nomenclature, the game is the same in principle; the same in the method of its manipulation; the same in its demoralizing results. Even “suckers” are known, but they are termed “lambs.”
Professional gamblers have not been slow to recognize this fact, nor have they scrupled to avail themselves of it. From this circumstance has sprung into existence the “bucket shops,” those preparatory schools for the penitentiary in which the young, the poor and the unsophisticated are incited to avarice, duplicity, embezzlement and actual theft. The school boy, the artisan and the bootblack read or hear of colossal fortunes, accumulated on the “floors” of commercial exchanges. To operate a “corner” is beyond their means; but the conviction is not slow in forcing itself upon their minds that they may at least follow humbly in the footsteps of men whose faults the public is willing to condone in view of their success. Herein lies the chief danger—to the perpetuity of the Nation—in those marble halls wherein gambling is conducted upon a scale in comparison with which that at Monaco and Monte Carlo is dwarfed into insignificance, and where one man rides triumphantly into wealth and power upon a sea whose bottom is strewn with wrecks.