The incident referred to is no uncommon experience, and reveals feelings alien to the fine spirit of hospitality so common to British life, and incidentally exhibits the blighting effect of the greed of money upon the life of society.
The gaming-house proper is a more sordid consideration, which is only mentioned to show that its existence has not been forgotten. More often than not it is managed by a woman, and the police raids reveal over and over again that such houses are the very sink of crime and vice.
From what has been written it will be seen that the evil has spread very insidiously into all ranks of society. The working woman gambles with the wage of her husband, the society woman with her dress allowance or her husband’s income, the spinster with stocks and shares through her lawyer, and the honestly intentioned though ill-advised charitable lady with raffle tickets at church bazaars. By refusing to participate in those lotteries women have one very obvious way of discountenancing an immoral method of raising money.
Remedial measures for the evil are suggested in another article in this book, but we would draw attention to one other remedy which would scotch the evil among women, viz. a resuscitation of the ideals of home life. “The home,” said the late Mr. Moody, “was founded before the Church, and you in Britain stand more in need of homes than you do of churches.” The failure of home is the failure of the parents to realise its duties and its responsibilities. And the failure to recognise these is traceable to the failure to recognise the value of a home religion. There is no home problem where there is true religion, and there is no power which keeps more alive the best qualities of human kind. Without it there can be neither that affection nor respect which makes it possible for the children of the home to remain attached to it, and every child induced by the example at home to take up the practice of betting is a disintegrating factor in that happiness which alone can bring stability and respect to character. This article will not have been written in vain if it helps in any way to reinvigorate and refresh the home ideal.
CRIME AND GAMBLING
By Canon Horsley
When I jot down in 1905 my impressions and observations as regards betting (chiefly on horse races) as one of the causes of various forms of crime, and of the type of character that thinks little of crime, and readily commits it on the lightest temptation or provocation, I am at first surprised to see how little mention there is of it in a book entitled Jottings from Jail that I published in 1887, after ten years’ experience in Clerkenwell Prison. The moral I draw is not that I ignored it amongst the many causes of criminality and of crime, nor that I considered it unimportant in comparison with the far more common cause—that is intemperance; but rather that the evil has been increasing by leaps and bounds since that decade, beginning in 1876, which I spent in prison as a young student of criminology. Nor indeed is there so much as might be expected in my later book Prisons and Provinces, although therein, when enumerating “ten desirable reforms” that stood out clearly in my retrospect, I find the following passage:—
5. The censorship of the press in the matter of publication of the unnecessary and corrupting details of divorce proceedings and suicides and of betting lists. Editors cannot be the moral prophets of the age while they keep a sporting prophet and while in bondage to advertisers and the lowest classes of their readers. Some crime is State-caused, much is paper-caused.