Part 2

This line of diagnosis makes it quite apparent what are the real supports of gambling, and how the vice inheres in the wider “social problem,” only to be cured or abated in proportion as sounder general conditions of social order are obtained. When we regard the actual life of an ordinary worker in a factory town we can easily understand the attraction of “betting.” It is hard to refuse sympathy to the factory “hand” or clerk who occasionally puts his “shilling” on a horse, going through his weary day’s work with the zest of expectancy and hope afforded by his speculation. It gives him a topic of conversation in the intervals of his work, and is for him a sort of “politics” in leisure hours: into his dull life it introduces an element of romance.

It is, however, impossible to discuss the practical ethics of modern gambling without regarding that factor of pure gambling, which we have analysed, in its actual place as part of a vicious amalgam in a dissipated life.

We have chiefly considered the derationalising influence of the anarchic element of chance which is the nucleus of the process. But, regarded as a mode of transfer of property, gambling involves a union of several anti-social desires. The desire to take unearned gains is, as we have seen, itself immoral, for such gains of necessity imply an injury to some other known or unknown persons, nor in the case of gambling is the damage thus done to the character of a winner mitigated by the knowledge that those from whom he wins have sought similar unearned gains at his expense. In many natures the possibility of such facile gain quickens the latent instinct of avarice, one of the most insidiously disintegrating influences in human society, inviting as it does complete self-absorption and an entire loss of sympathy with the material interests of one’s fellows. The brooding infatuation of the habitual gambler chills human sympathy more certainly than any other practice, inducing not indeed enmity or active animosity so much as a callousness which views the misfortunes of others with placid indifference. It is just this absorption upon selfish ends in reference to incidents fraught with emotional strain that is prone at once to break down the whole fabric of the moral character and to dethrone the reason. For as man is only moral and rational as a being who stands in orderly relation to other similar beings in human society, so a practice based on a virtual denial of this social order is the arch-enemy of human personality: instead of a man we have a self-absorbed emotionalist. “In the making of a bet—a man resolves to repress the use of his reason, his will, his conscience, his affections; only one part of his nature is allowed free play, and that is his emotions.”[1]

The passion of gambling, once settled in a man, seems to take physical root in him and to be almost as difficult to expel as drink, opium, or any other acquired physical vice. In extreme cases, it is often held, gambling tends to absorb all other interests, even swallowing up its associate vices. This, however, is not the normal case. Gambling commonly consorts with drink: gambling-houses are commonly places for the sale of alcoholic liquors, and wherever the law permits, or can be evaded, drink-shops are betting haunts. Professional gamblers are doubtless sober when they ply their craft, for skill and cunning are requisite in most kinds of “mixed” gambling: a broker “cornering” the market, like a bookmaker handling a sudden shift in the odds, or a card-sharper with suspicious dupes, needs to have his wits about him. But it is not as gamblers but as tricksters that these men need to be sober, and as they require sobriety in themselves they desire the opposite in their dupes. Hence, the business of gambling is often done in an atmosphere of alcohol. This is not, indeed, invariably the case. The temperament of some people is so sanguine and so prone to reckless play that no physical stimulant seems necessary. But in Northern European peoples drink is usually necessary to induce that instability of judgment and disregard of the future which are conditions of gambling.

The statistics of crime prove beyond all cavil that gambling is the king’s highway to fraud and theft. This is not merely because it loosens general morality and in particular saps the rationale of property, but because cheating is inseparably associated with most actual modes of gambling. This does not imply that most persons who bet are actually cheats or thieves; but persons who continue to be cheated or robbed, half-conscious of the nature of the operations, are fitting themselves for the other and more profitable part if they are thrown in the way of acquiring a sufficient quantity of evil skill or opportunity. The “honour” of a confirmed gambler, even in high life, is known to be a very hollow commodity, and where there is less to lose in social esteem even this slender substitute for virtue is absent. What percentage of “men who bet” would refuse to utilise a secret tip of a “scratched” favourite or the contents of an illegally disclosed sporting telegram? The barrier between fraud and smartness does not exist for most of them.

Serious investigation of the gambling process discloses the fact that pure gambling does not afford any economic basis of livelihood, save in a few cases where, as at the roulette-table or in a lottery, those who gamble know and willingly accept the chances against them. And even in the case of the roulette-table the profits to the bank come largely from the advantage which a large fund possesses in play against a smaller fund: in the fluctuations of the game the smaller fund which plays against the bank is more likely at some point in the game to be absorbed so as to disable the player from continuing his play. If a man with £1000 were to play “pitch and toss” for sovereigns with a number of men, each of whom carried £10, he must, if they played long, win all their money. So, even where skill and fraud are absent, economic force is a large factor in success.

Since professional gambling in a stockbroker, a croupier, a bookmaker, or any other species, involves some use of superior knowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the “chances” amounts to “loading” the dice, the non-professional gambler necessarily finds himself a loser on any long series of events. These losses are found in fact to be a fruitful cause of crime, especially among men employed in businesses where sums of money belonging to the firm are passing through their hands. It is not difficult for a man who constantly has in his possession considerable funds which he has collected for his employer to persuade himself that a temporary use of these funds, which otherwise lie idle, to help him over a brief emergency, is not an act of real dishonesty. He is commonly right in his plea that he had no direct intention to defraud his employer. He expected to be able to replace the sum before its withdrawal was discovered. But since not only legally but morally a person must be presumed to “intend” that which is a natural or reasonable result of his action, an indirect intention to defraud must be ascribed to him. He is aware that he is acting wrongly, as well as illegally, in using the firm’s money for any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing the quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances extenuating his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it, must be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner or later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet his obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more readily for two reasons. First, there is a genuine probability (not so large, however, as he thinks) that he can replace the money before any “harm is done.” So long as he does replace it, no harm appears to him to have been done: the firm has lost nothing by his action. This narrower circumstance of extenuation is supported by a broader one. The whole theory of modern commercial enterprise involves using other people’s money, getting the advantage of this use for one’s self and paying to the owner as little as one can. A bank or a finance company is entrusted with sums of money belonging to outsiders on condition that when required, or upon agreed notice, they shall be repaid. Any intelligent clerk in such a firm may be well aware that the profits of the firm are earned by a doubly speculative use of this money which belongs to other people: it is employed by the firm in speculative investments which do not essentially differ from betting on the turf, and the cash in hand or other available assets are kept at a minimum on the speculative chance that depositors will not seek to withdraw their money as they are legally entitled to do. In a firm which thus lives by speculating with other people’s money, is it surprising that a clerk should pursue what seems to him substantially the same policy on a smaller scale? It may doubtless be objected that a vital difference exists in the two cases: the investor who puts his money into the hands of a speculative company does so knowingly and for some expected profit; the clerk who speculates with the firm’s money does so secretly, and no possible gain to the firm balances the chance of loss. But even to this objection it is possible to reply that the revelation of modern finance in such cases as the Liberator and the Globe Finance Companies shows that real knowledge of the use to which money will be put cannot be imputed to the investor in such companies, and that, though some gain may possibly accrue to him, such gain is essentially subsidiary to the projects of the promoters and managers of these companies.

It is true that these are not normal types of modern business: they are commonly designated gambling companies, some of them actually criminal in their methods. But they only differ in degree, not in kind, from a very large body of modern businesses, whose operations are so highly speculative, their risks so little understood by the investing public, and their profits apportioned with so little regard to the body of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category. In a word, secret gambling with other people’s money, on the general line of “heads I win, tails you lose,” is so largely prevalent in modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial atmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either not illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor delinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employees are more easily detected and punished.

But, living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other people’s money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a part in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an employee, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation, falls into lax ways of regarding other people’s money, and comes in an hour of emergency to “borrow” the firm’s money. This does not excuse his crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history.

Publicity and education are, of course, the chief instruments for converting illegitimate into legitimate speculation, for changing commercial gambling into commercial foresight. This intelligent movement towards a restoration of discernible order and rationality in business processes, by eliminating “chances” and placing the transfer of property and the earning of industrial gains on a more rational foundation, must, of course, go _pari passu_ with other movements of social and industrial reforms which aim simultaneously at the education of individual personality and the reformation of the economic environment. Every step which places the attainment of property upon a sane rational basis, associating it with proportionate personal productive effort, every step which enables men and women to find orderly interests in work and leisure by gaining opportunities to express themselves in art or play under conditions which stimulate new human wants and supply means of satisfying them, will make for the destruction of gambling.

THE EXTENT OF GAMBLING

By JOHN HAWKE

GROWTH OF BETTING

The most disquieting feature in the consideration of the state of the country with regard to this habit is its spread among the wage-earning classes. By them it was little practised when it first became systematic in connection with horse-racing among people of better means. Groups of the latter class lost money and fortunes long before the fashion took any general hold of very considerable numbers of the aristocratic and wealthy classes. Betting took place principally at the race meetings. There were grand-stands upon some of the race-courses many years before the close of the eighteenth century, probably the largest being the one at Doncaster, erected in 1779 at a cost of £7000. It was not until ten years later that a regular market for credit betting was established by the institution of Tattersall’s Subscription Rooms; and, that the original purpose of the grand-stand was only for viewing the races, is made clear by the contemporary records. At Ascot Heath, a separate wooden shed had to be used by those who wished to bet. Even as late as 1833, although the Epsom stand was the largest in Europe, the betting market was kept away elsewhere, upon the hill. Six years later, complaints having been made of the betting market being held in the grand-stand at Doncaster, to the annoyance of the spectators, especially ladies, arrangements were decided upon for the future to form an enclosure for betting outside the stand. Similar precautions had previously been taken at Goodwood. Betting was transacted at Newmarket at betting posts, where rings were formed on the heath. Betting was also carried on away from the courses at premises belonging to Tattersall’s in London (which, however, in 1839 consisted merely of a small apartment, with only 300 members on the books), and in the vicinity of the course at the Newmarket Subscription Rooms, where there were only 57 members, other than those belonging to the Jockey Club. There were also special rooms hired at Doncaster, York, and Liverpool for members of either of the above clubs to bet in. A chronicle informs us, in the reign of William the Fourth, that although the number of spectators at Newmarket seldom exceeded 500, mostly of the highest classes, the majority on horseback, the turf was becoming more popular in 1836 and the attendances larger.

It will thus be understood that the general public, for a long time entirely excluded from the privileged betting circle, could only take part in the business by the connivance of some of the professional men having the entrée. In 1849, however, the Newmarket authorities, seeing the feasibility of largely adding to their funds, arranged that a small subscription should confer temporary membership of the Newmarket Rooms. This caused many complaints by the old habitués, and it was found necessary, in view of the dubious standing of some of the new-comers, to modify the credit system, and to insist upon daily settlements. The cash gaming of the race-course indulged in by the great bulk of race-goers was not betting, but was carried on by means of roulette-tables, lotteries, sweepstakes, and other adjuncts of the gambling-booth. The Select Committee of the House of Commons (1844), in reporting against the miscellaneous race-course gambling, clearly did not anticipate that the grand-stands and enclosures would take the place of these other methods, and become sources of great profit as places used for gambling by betting, and that the abolition of booths would merely result in the transfer of the gamblers to the enclosures or rings, as may be seen by the following paragraph from their report:—

Your Committee cannot consider the establishment of gambling-booths on race-courses as in any way an essential accompaniment to racing, and they feel that they cannot too strongly express their opinion that all such practices ought to be entirely and universally discontinued. If there is in any place a real demand for races, money enough is sure to be subscribed for plates and stakes to be run for, and if at any place sufficient sums for these purposes cannot be raised without the aid of gambling-booth rents, the races at such places had much better be left off.

Sixty years have gone by, and race-course proprietors acknowledge that the loss of the present gambling-ring rents, or entrance fees, would put a stop to three-fourths of the race meetings in the kingdom.

Legislative enactments followed the Parliamentary Reports, and to a great extent swept away the miscellaneous gambling, which was only to make way, unhappily, for the more subtle form of turf betting. For years before the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the proprietors of public-houses (or persons in collusion with them), and of specially hired offices in the great towns, had been in the habit of using their premises for the purpose of accepting betting money, and, after a time, relations were established between them and some of the credit-betting professionals belonging to the clubs and subscription rooms. This was how betting by those away from the race-course continued, and even increased in volume, notwithstanding the effect of the Betting House Act in 1853, which, immediate as it was with regard to these betting offices, was partially neutralised by the change of location brought about when the new railways were beginning to convey large numbers at a moderate expense to the course, and by the laying on of the telegraph offering the means to others of rapid communication with the betting men at the race meetings, for gambling purposes, by those unable to make the journey.

The time was one of transition, and legislators appear to have overlooked the fact that the miscellaneous booth gambling having been previously suppressed, their enactment putting an end to ready-money betting establishments, then chiefly in towns, would only result in their virtual transfer to every race-course and so-called club. There had been a great deal of irregular and surreptitious cash betting upon the race-course, but it was not a generally recognised system. It was one that had gradually grown. The bookmaker with a satchel taking money in advance and giving tickets, was unknown on our race-courses in the forties. Later on it was particularly recorded that at the Chester Cup race of 1852, one large bookmaker took a great many £5 notes, and the practice was then coming into fashion. It was, however, to laxity in applying the law that the ready-money, or deposit, system owed its subsequent continuation and increase in volume, for there is no doubt whatever that the Act of 1853 was considered at that time to apply to the evil in race-course enclosures as elsewhere. A recognised contemporary authority wrote: “The fatal facility induced by the open deposit system is nipped in the bud”; and another, “Cash betting stopped upon the passing of the Act.” The temptation, however, to race managers to wink at wholesale infraction of the law was very great. Entrance fees to the enclosures promised to become their financial backbone, and to enable them to add enormously to the value of the stakes and cups. And it was found that to permit ready-money betting was to turn a few score of entrance fees to the rings into thousands. That the practice was even many years afterwards considered illegitimate is shown by the Jockey Club notice in the _Racing Calendar_ of July 23, 1874, and the official notice at Goodwood by the Duke of Richmond, “No ready-money betting will be allowed upon any part of the course or park,” in the _Calendar_ of the same date.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRESENT INCREASE

BETTING

It is not necessary to follow in any detail, beyond this period, the growth of horse-racing, and the practice of betting connected with it which had now become a national foible. The foregoing sketch was desirable for the understanding of the subject, owing to the absence of any other authentic continuous record, and by the fact that the masses of the nation had not become a gambling people as compared with foreign populations, either in other ways or in this, until long after the introduction of the sport. The above review of the past takes us up to the year mentioned (1874), when the failure of a prosecution, owing to the interest or prejudice of the Newmarket magistrates, for permitting ready-money betting in the rings, finally opened the flood-gates of the system, which now, aided by railway, telegraph, and press, spread over the country in an ever-increasing volume, and from tens of thousands of sources in city, town, and village drew its main increment from the money-making and wage-earning classes. Hardly any portion of the country, any section of the population, was free from the blight. The bookmakers multiplied. The wealthy and the idle squandered fortunes on them; the toilers brought their sovereigns and half-crowns in myriads. A large portion of the press battened upon the advertisements of prosperous betting men. Servants of the state in high legal positions, devotees of the race-course, and others of subordinate station, gave decisions as to the construction of the law so framed as to put no check upon the spread of professional betting; and horse-racing became a trade instead of a sport. The enormous money interests honeycombed it with dishonesty. Sometimes owners, and more often trainers, jockeys, touts, and betting men, arranged which horse should win, according to the exigencies of the betting market; and, not unfrequently, poison played its part when it was necessary, from the trade point of view, to prevent an animal from first passing the winning-post. The very atmosphere of the turf was pestiferous; it corrupted everything of it and connected with it. The pretence that it was any longer a noble sport was only countenanced by the fashion of titled people patronising it. The ancient plea as to its improving the breed of horses became a byword as the number of yearling races increased and the length of the courses was reduced. The pregnant sentence in the Report of the old Committee (1844) of the House of Lords was forgotten: “The Committee would consider the advantages of horse-racing more than problematical if they were to be unavoidably purchased by excessive gambling and the vice and misery which it entails.” The streams of small bets swelled into rivers, and the rivers filled an ocean swamping the land. The twenty or so bookmakers of the beginning of the century grew into an army of twenty thousand. Many made fortunes; nearly all made a living. Those who confined their operations to the race-courses might be said to do less harm than those who offered facilities away from the course, only that they usually acted in relation to these latter as the wholesale dealer does for the retailer. One of these retail men who was not given to boasting (_Chambers’s Journal_, 1898) admitted that his business had a turnover of £250,000. It must be remembered that the individuals in the streets are merely the journeymen of well-to-do bookmakers. During last year, amongst the many thousands of fines for the offence, evidence was given—and there are scores of similar cases—that a lad of 16 was one of several servants of a master bookmaker, who mapped out the district amongst his subordinates.