THE VICE OF EXCESS.
There are forces in the world that can destroy us; we must protect ourselves against them.—To be truly brave, we must be ready to face these forces when there is a reason for so doing. We must be ready to face the cannon for our country; to plunge into the swollen stream to save the drowning child; to expose ourselves to contagious diseases in order to nurse the sick.
To do these things without sufficient reason is foolhardiness. To expose ourselves needlessly to disease; to put ourselves in the range of a cannon, to jump into the stream, with no worthy end in view, or for the very shallow reason of showing off how brave we can be, is folly and madness. Doing such things because someone dares us to do them is not courage, but cowardice.
Gambling, the most fatal form of this fondness for taking needless risks.—The gambler is too feeble in will, too empty in mind, too indolent in body to carve out his destiny with his own right hand. And so he stakes his well-being on the throw of the dice; the turn of a wheel; or the speed of a horse. This invocation of fortune is a confession of the man's incompetence and inability to solve the problem of his life satisfactorily by his own exertions. It is the most demoralizing of practices. For it establishes the habit of staking well-being not on one's own honest efforts, but on outside influences and forces. It is the dethronement of will and the deposition of manhood.
In addition to being degrading to the individual it is injurious to others. It is anti-social. It makes one man's gain depend on another's loss: while the social welfare demands that gains shall in all cases be mutual. It violates the fundamental law of equivalence.
Since the essence of gambling is the abrogation of the will, every indulgence weakens the power to resist the temptation. Gambling soon becomes a mania. Honest ways of earning money seem slow and dull. And the habit becomes confirmed before the victim is aware of the power over him that it has gained. Every form of gain which is contingent upon another's loss partakes of the nature of gambling. Raffling, playing for stakes, betting, buying lottery tickets, speculation in which there is no real transfer of goods, but mere winning or losing on the fluctuations of the market, are all forms of gambling. They are all animated by the desire to get something for nothing: a desire which we can respect when a helpless pauper asks for alms; but of which in any form an able-bodied man ought to be ashamed.
THE PENALTY.
The shame of cowardice.—Man is meant to be superior to things outside him. When we see him bowing down to somebody whom he does not really believe in; when we see him yielding to forces which he does not himself respect; when living is more to him than living well; when there is a threat which can make him cringe, or a bribe that can make his tongue speak false—then we feel that the manhood has gone out of him, and we cannot help looking on his fall with sorrow and with shame. The penalty which follows moral cowardice is nowhere more clearly stated than in these severe and solemn lines which Whittier wrote when he thought a great man had sacrificed his convictions to his desire for office and love of popularity:
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore!
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains,—
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.
