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Q. I will get you to state if it is not a fact that a large number of pool rooms were running openly with telegraph operators in the place, pools were being sold, money paid, and everything running at full blast?
A. I never was present; I don’t know anything about it.
Q. Was there any complaint to you of that kind of thing being done?
A. No particular complaint at all. The newspaper boys often came around and said there was pool selling going on at different places.
Q. Could not the police of the city of Chicago as readily have found these people who have been fined for gambling as the Sheriff?
A. Well, I don’t know. I presume if a desperate effort had been made to look that kind of thing up we might, possibly, have been successful.
Through these resorts, which offer inducements for betting on distant horse races, the confidential clerk, the outside collector for business houses, the employes of banks, young men in all grades of employment involving the handling of the funds of their employers, together with the men of moderate salaries, working men, and the large number of sports who live by their wits, are assisted in a downward career, until defalcations, destitution in homes, and a still more acute phase of living on one’s wits, are reached, followed by flight, arrest, conviction, imprisonment, the breaking up of homes, and the necessity for the resort of the broken sport to the tactics of the hold-up man.
Yet they are tolerated, until their shameless management becomes a public scandal. Then follows a pull, a period of purification of very slight duration, and again a slow start. Speedily again they are in as full gallop as are the horses whose names they post, and as around the race track the horses go, so around the vice track the pool rooms go. The losing patrons pass under the wire at the end of their foolish struggle to win, some to the penitentiary, some to despair, and some to suicide.