GAMBLING AND CITIZENSHIP
By J. Ramsay MacDonald
The devotees of the Goddess of Fortune are found in all societies, from the Kaffir tribe to the sensuous coteries of our own civilisation. The moment of uncertainty which lapses between the casting of the dice and the discovery of the result, between the dealing of the cards and the examination of the hand, between the starting of the ball and its settlement in a pocket, is an alluring experience which rules conduct in proportion to the weakness of the moral character and the disorganisation of the intellectual life. The unknown must always have a fascination for men, and that fascination, centred on trivial things and joined with cupidity, marks the low state of intelligence and morals in which gambling flourishes.
I
Almost every observer to-day agrees that betting has reached colossal proportions and is still increasing. At the street corner, in the newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop, in the barber’s saloon, in the club, in the public-house, in the factory, the bookmaker or his agent is ready to receive the money of men, women, and children, and victims of the habit are at hand to lead astray the novices still uninitiated in the worship of the seductive goddess.
The chief characteristic of the present outburst of the gambling habit is that it is becoming a class disease. People of experience seem to be pretty much agreed that those living on the marginal line of poverty and those on the marginal line of respectability are specially liable to fall victims to the habit. Both of these classes have in common a feeling that their lives are profoundly unsatisfactory. The dreary drudgery of the life of a wage-earner who oscillates between 15s. and 25s. a week, with an occasional turn of nothing at all; the unsatisfied craving in the life of a man too proud to take his place amongst the working classes but too poor and despised to be received in professional ranks—can only lead astray those doomed to them.
To both of these marginal groups the mental excitement and pecuniary allurements of “trying their luck” are almost irresistible, and, though they join in nothing else and in every other respect are poles asunder, they go together to throw their coppers before Fortuna lest haply she may return them favours an hundredfold.
That, I take it, is the most significant feature of the present spread of gambling. It is the evidence of social failure showing itself in the conduct of social groups or classes. It therefore flourishes with other disquieting symptoms, such as the inordinate love of spectacular effect, the demand for mere amusement, the distaste for serious and strenuous effort, the spread of drunkenness—all pointing to a poverty of personality, a bareness of the inner chambers of the mind, occurring in such a way as to indicate that we are faced not merely with the moral breakdown of isolated individuals but with the results of a serious failure on the part of society. We have to deal not merely with individual lapses but with a social disease. From that point of view this paper is written.
Much has been written upon the gambling motive, and I am not sure that the final word has yet been said upon it. Certainly the simple explanations of it as a “sin” do not meet the facts of the case. Avarice does not explain it, because the avaricious do not risk fortunes on the turn of a wheel or the tip of a stableman. And yet avarice enters into the gambler’s character. The pleasure of possessing does not explain it, because if every gambler were to be made as rich as Crœsus he would gamble the more. I am inclined to believe that the workman gambles to charm ennui away from his doorstep, and having begun he goes on partly in the hope that he will recoup himself for his losses, partly to continue keeping ennui away. Roughly, the same motives influence the other gambling class—the clerks and the other wage receivers who would fain believe that they are paid “salaries.”[2]