Hence, turning once more for a moment to consider the causes which have led to the present slackening of moral fibre, I find one of the most important to be the loss of the democratic fervour which characterised the people during about three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The people have lost taste for politics. The generous enthusiasms of 1848 are criticised by the aged youth of our schools to-day as having been over-sentimental and mere dreams. At any rate, they gave us sound literature—Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Chambers’s Papers for the People, Cassell’s Popular Educator; they laid the foundations of a most important part of democratic education in the Mechanics’ Institutes; they gave birth to a self-reliant generation of working men. Until citizenship, radiantly setting out towards the splendour of a perfected humanity, attended by a train of the beatitudes which the heart and mind of man have been ever seeking, commands the allegiance and the services of our people, the crowd, obedient to the necessity to worship imposed upon it by its nature, will bow to false gods; and men, obedient to their intellectual promptings to dally occasionally in the temple of Fortuna, will do so in the gross, the only, way which is at present possible for them.
EXISTING LEGISLATION
By John Hawke
When the intelligent public has become convinced of the existence of a great social evil, it wants to know, in the first place, what laws are in existence which can be applied in remedy of it, and what amendments of the law are needed.
The text-books upon the present laws, through no fault of their authors, are somewhat obsolete, owing to recent not altogether consistent decisions of the Courts, although Law Relating to Betting, by G. H. Stutfield, and Law of Gambling (Coldridge and Hawksford), contain much valuable information. The following summary is intended to present a skeleton view of the legal position at this date, and for sake of convenience the subject is divided under the two heads of Miscellaneous Gambling and Betting. Whichever portion of the subject is treated, it will be observed that the laws are both inadequate and not fully applied.
Miscellaneous gambling must be subdivided into (M) all kinds of individual gaming unconnected with trade; (N) gambling in the stock, produce, and other markets.