It seems little less than a scandal that new licences for experimental purposes are practically unobtainable, and that the working classes are shut out of a fair enjoyment of comfort and decency in tavern accommodation, whilst the supply of luxuriously appointed hotels and restaurants for the upper classes knows no bounds.
And there is another new sin that the Pharisee regards with peculiar horror when it manifests itself among the working classes in any of its popular forms—the sin of gambling. I remember when Bernard Vaughan preached a sermon in Manchester to show that betting was not in itself sinful, the whites of many Nonconformist eyes were turned appealingly to heaven. Heaven gave no sign in the matter, and we may take it the appeal was dismissed. For what can be sounder than the Publican view of this and other matters, namely, that eating, drinking and wagering are not in themselves sinful, but that the sin comes in with the excess. Gluttony, drunkenness and gambling—if we use the last word only in its expression of excess—those are the sins; and even a Pharisee would not be too strict about eating, for something like gluttony has ever been attendant upon the profession of piety.
For my part, so far from forbidding children to bet, I should teach them how to do it prettily. A round game, say Pope Joan, played for fish—the engraved mother-of-pearl variety for choice—at which children learn to lose or win in a sweetly mannered and unselfish way would always
make, I think, a charming moral lesson. I remember my father had strong views about the importance of everyone being taught to bet—or gamble, if you prefer the word—in youth. My brother and I had always to play whist against our parents for farthing points—twopence a bumper—which had to be paid when we lost out of our own pocket-money, and our fellow-gamblers exacted their winnings to the uttermost farthing.
My father himself admitted that this was, for us, excessive gambling, but then there were not in those days many serious financial calls upon our means. I should not care to-day to risk so large a proportion of my weekly income on the hazard of the card. But the point is that if you learn to gamble for definite sums at definite games you can easily content the wagering spirit that is within you without rushing into excess. And think how well it would be if the schools and Universities turned out lads capable of leading their fourth best. Surely a man is a better citizen whose powers of observation have been sufficiently developed to enable him to see a call for trumps, and is not the eleven rule as near to the business of life as the rule in Shelley’s case? At the University a good professor of whist might make his chair self-supporting by playing with his pupils for very moderate points. How few professors do that in classics, theology, or even the sciences. The more the matter is gravely considered the clearer it is that gambling requires educational stimulus rather than legislative restraint.
It wants the Publican’s treatment rather than the Pharisee’s.
What a far better world it will be for the English workman when he is invited to play his rubber in a neat restaurant after the manner of the Belgian who orders his beer and his jeu-de-bac, and rattles the dice with noisy merriment on the marble tables. Why should not the municipality set up a sixpenny, or, if you will, a penny totalizer on the racecourse, and abolish the yelling crowd of bookmakers, who by some Pharisaical interpretation of the law are encouraged to carry on their trade upon a racecourse because it is not a place within the meaning of the Act?
What moves the Pharisee to roll in the dust and groan about gambling is difficult to understand. For in every business transaction in life there is an element of gambling. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer promotes a great scheme of health insurance he invites his customers, in the phrase of the ring, “to buy money,” and calls out the odds as nine to four on the field. He knows the gambling instinct in mankind, and very properly appeals to it. And, indeed, the gamble is everywhere. Even in the County Court when you pay your hearing fee there is the uncertainty of the law, and the betting is generally against the defendant’s solvency, and you may never get even your original stake out of the pool. What are the odds when the workman buys his grocery or drapery on credit that he will get his money’s worth?
I fear there is an element of jealousy in these sermons
against gambling. The preachers do not want the working man to gamble with the bookmaker, but to put his money in some insurance or investing society with prominent Pharisees on the board, calling out tempting odds in specious advertisements which the Publican would be too honest to offer. And if there is to be a statute against gambling, let us so draft it and work it as not to kill trivial amusement, but to warn off the course pious directors of fraudulent companies who in prayerful tones commend their wild-cat gambles to the working man.