Or his deserts are small,
Who does not put it to the touch,
Or gain or lose it all.
In the evolution of the race an important part has no doubt been played by the men and the communities whose self-confidence was sufficiently strong to enable them to make large drafts upon the unknown. Abnormally and respectably—as in the form of genius—this spirit gives us “the man of destiny”; abnormally but not respectably—as in the form of burglary—this spirit gives us the high criminal. Normally, properly controlled and toned, it gives us the successful man of business, the leader and inspirer of men. This playing with the unknown in the faith that the fates are favourably disposed has undoubtedly been, and is still to be, a very important spur to energy, and one of the determining factors in national survivals in the future. Indeed, it is inseparable from human nature. Men will not tolerate a uniform drudgery, they will not live in a world which is nothing but a featureless expanse. And this intellectual appetite for risk, for projecting one’s self on to the silent stream of fate upon which the barque of life mysteriously floats, must be satisfied either legitimately or illegitimately, either in accordance with sound morals or in the teeth of sound morals. The latter will be the case if we condemn, as we do now, large sections of our population to conditions of life from which their intellectual nature can get no satisfaction. The appetites of that nature will not die away. Its functions will not atrophy and degenerate. It will simply accommodate itself to its circumstances. If it cannot command the food of the gods, it will fill its belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and find a troubled satisfaction in its degradation. “To be confined in the dark, or without occupation, is to be made the victim of subjective tedium,” says Bain.[7] We have confined our people in the dark, and they are gambling to break the tedium.
Consequently, when we consider the responsibilities of citizenship for the spread of the gambling disease with a view to devising some cure, we shall have to begin by assuming that prohibitive Acts will not carry us very far. We can stop bookmakers or their agents receiving bets in the public streets or any public place; we can turn them off race-courses and refuse to recognise any enclosure as sanctuary. We can even go further, and prosecute any one who receives from another betting payments on any event whatever. This last would be going very far—too far, perhaps, to be practical. But at any rate we could prohibit the receipt of money from children. We could also stop the publication of betting news, and our Post Office could refuse to transmit circulars encouraging the gambling appetite.[8] We might even combat successfully the much more difficult problem of how to prohibit gambling at church and chapel bazaars. But, when we have done all that, we have not gone very far. We have simply restored life to its old, dull, monotonous drab, and we have turned the natural instincts which the gambling habit satisfies from feeding at one trough to find husks in another. To the great mass of the people we shall but appear to be smug Pharisees, and a reaction will set in which in its aggressive strength will play much greater havoc than even the steady growth of the disease before it was challenged. Time after time the failure of the reform campaigns of outraged respectability in America has taught this simple lesson in moral politics. One cannot devastate and then say, “Behold the good!” The gambling habit must be elbowed out, not stamped out.
I would be exceeding the purposes and limits of this paper did I attempt to sketch a programme of reforms which in my opinion would do the elbowing. I can only indicate the skeleton of such a programme, and I do so, not so much to urge my readers to accept it, as to emphasise that the attack upon the gambling habit can be successful only if it is positive and constructive, and not merely negative and prohibitory.
When we try to get to the root of our social vices of to-day we ultimately find ourselves contemplating the sad effects of the steady stream of population away from the green meadows on to the grey pavements. Overcrowding in the towns and dilapidation in the villages are the result. At best, under existing conditions there must always be a fringe of our city population living from hand to mouth, contracting the character of the casual and the loafer. But this fringe is made much broader by the present urban immigration; the tarnished threads in it are of finer quality than they would be otherwise, and the original excellence of some of its stuff makes it all the more prone to vices of certain kinds. The problem which good citizenship has to solve then, it seems to me, is twofold. It has to discover how people can be induced to stay on the land, and how, in towns, they can be provided with proper surroundings. The only hope of a rural population in England is the spread of intensive cultivation and of co-operative agriculture,[9] and that again can hardly become general until our present system of landlordism is broken up and public authorities own the land and let it to suit the convenience of cultivators.
The town problems must be solved by a combination of public and private associated effort. We must give up all hope of private owners being able to supply decent houses at reasonable rents. The municipality should become the sole housing authority within its own area, and where it spreads out its arms of tramways beyond its own boundaries it should be able to develop building estates on its lines of communication. With a housing and tram policy should be combined a recreation policy, for it is the lack of recreation in modern city life which leads to so many vicious indulgences. Parks, music, museums, libraries, hardly touch the needs of the workman no longer on the sunny side of thirty-five, wearied after a day’s work. The public-house or the workman’s club is his resort.
Here we come to the centre of our difficulty. We cannot meet the needs of the average workman who is not a teetotaller unless we place the public-house under public control. This seems to me to be the first step, not only towards national temperance, but towards the provision of that rational amusement which is to protect our industrial population from vicious allurements.[10]
But when all these facilities for an intellectual life have been provided, they will be in danger of being neglected unless the people who are supposed to benefit by them are led to pursue worthy human ideals. The appreciation of the worthy is an inward quality. Here we come to the saving grace of political convictions, the purifying effect of citizen ideals. An immunity from anti-social indulgences depends upon the general diffusion through society of an active desire for social improvement by democratic means. This acts in two ways. It first of all quickens the social conscience and the moral pride of the common man, and it also safeguards him from imitating the vices of the worthless upper classes, which, without the opposition of a strong democratic spirit, become the models for the recreation and amusement of the masses.