Part 23

A slip, or what is known in a printing office as a "proof," is then printed, and armed with this the blackmailer pays a visit to the person he intends to fleece. He represents himself as being connected with a reputable newspaper, and says that he has been sent to get the "other side of the story," at the same time producing the slip on which is printed the startling tale, which, if made public, would in all probability seriously effect the social standing and the commercial integrity of the intended victim. In the majority of cases the person approached will at once inquire how much the newspaper would pay for such an article, and the reply usually is, "From twenty to twenty-five dollars." "Suppose I pay for the article instead of the newspaper?" says the victim, "and I give you fifty dollars, wouldn't that repay you for your trouble in writing the article?" This is just what the blackmailer has been waiting for. He hems and haws for awhile, so as not to appear too anxious, or for the purpose of getting a higher bid, but the interview usually winds up in his securing a sum of money to suppress the information.

As he is leaving the house it may occur to the victim that as long as the story is known to the editor of the paper there may be a publication anyhow, and on this point he makes inquiry. "Oh," says the blackmailer, "there will be no danger of that. I will report that I have fully investigated the story, and that there is not a word of truth in it, and, of course, they will not dare to run the risk of being sued for heavy damages for printing it."

FEW "BEATS" AMONG REPORTERS.

There is no necessity for any man being victimized by the "newspaper beat." In the first place, no reputable newspaper ever puts a damaging story in type before every side of it has been thoroughly investigated. The very fact of a man exhibiting a "proof" is evidence that he is a fraud and has no newspaper connection. It can be said with truth that the repertorial profession of America has fewer "beats" in it than any other profession or business that can be mentioned. The majority of reporters are ambitious to gain higher positions, and it is a rare thing to find a man regularly connected with a newspaper descending to such trickery. If he is a genuine reporter he will exhibit his credentials, and should he be assigned to investigate a story that effects the standing of a respectable citizen, and be offered a bribe, he would undoubtedly publish that fact as an additional proof of the truth of what he has written. The treatment for this kind of a blackmailer is to kick him out of the house, and bid him do his worse. Depend upon it, the "scandal" will never become public.

THE NEW YORK WAY.

They watch some disreputable resort of the higher order until they see some respectable looking man or woman coming out of it. Suppose it is a woman, who may or may not have gone there for an improper purpose. The blackmailer follows her home, thus ascertaining her place of residence. The next day he calls upon her. He puts on an air of deep solemnity.

"I am an agent," says he, "employed by a society to ascertain the character of certain suspected houses. I saw you enter one of them yesterday and know that you remained there more than an hour. You know its character, and I shall, therefore, subpoena you as a witness." Then he puts his hand in his inside pocket, as if to get the subpoena.

Of course he hasn't any, but the woman usually faints about this time, and on her recovering is usually willing to take the jewels off her wrists and fingers, if she has no money, to buy her immunity from the subpoena. Once she makes a payment she is lost and has to continue it month after month, and year after year, till some kind of a scandal breaks out and she finds, with shame and sorrow, that her previous payments have only put off the evil day.

GAMBLING AND CRIME.

BEST CURE FOR GAMBLING: TEACH PUPILS IN SCHOOL LAWS OF CHANCE.

Gambling Device Swindle Is Exposed in the Army and Navy--The Scope of Fraud Is World-Wide.

There Is No Such Thing As An Honest Gambler--Suicides Are Common--Gambling Kings Go Broke, and Often Die in the Poorhouse--It Is a Hard, Cold, Brutal Road the Gambler Travels--It Ends Badly.

We do not believe that many young men DELIBERATELY take up the gambler's career. They drift into it through weakness, temptation or accident. If any young man DOES imagine that in the gambler's life he can find more money, less work and more happiness than in honest living and honest work, he is the victim of a dangerous delusion.

A most miserable creature is the gambler. He knows himself, and therefore he hates himself.

No man can gamble and be honest, even with his friends, even with his family. The idea of the gambler is to get from another man what he has not earned from that man, giving nothing in exchange. And when a man spends his time trying to get away the money of others with no return he soon drifts into throwing aside ALL honesty, even the gambler's brand.

The unsuccessful gambler is one of the worst of wrecks. He runs his little course of dissipation, dishonesty, cheating and swindling. He is over-matched and eliminated by the bigger, keener, self-controlled gambler, who eats him up as the big spider eats up the little spider. Hanging around saloons, begging for a little money with which to bet, doing the dirty work of the bigger gamblers--that is the fate of the little gambling cast-off. He is not worth talking about.

The gambler's life is simply the life of a criminal. And, like every other successful criminal, the successful gambler has got to work very hard. What the burglar gets, what the pickpocket gets, what the gambler gets, is money painfully accumulated. The successful burglar, or pickpocket, or gambler must work hard and be forever on the alert. He must be remorselessly cruel in taking money from those that cannot stand the loss. He must be indifferent to all sense of decency, for he knows that he is robbing women and children.

The criminal in ANY line, gambler or other, cannot be a self-indulgent man if he is to be successful. The young man who imagines that the gambler's life is a gay and easy one is badly mistaken. If he tries it he will live to envy ANY honest man who has a right to look other men in the face.

WHY GAMBLING MAKES MEN COMMIT CRIMES.

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 "honor" of a confirmed gambler, even in high life, is known to be 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 utilize a secret tip of a "scratched" favorite or the contents of an illegally disclosed sporting telegram? The barrier between fraud and smartness does not exist for most of them.

NO BASIS FOR LIVELIHOOD.

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 than likely at some point in the game to be absorbed so as to disable the player from continuing his play.

If a man with $5,000 were to play "pitch and toss" for $5 gold pieces with a number of men, each of whom carried only $50, he must, if they played long enough, win all their money. So, even where skill and fraud are absent, economic force is a large factor in success.

TEMPTATION TO EMBEZZLE.

Since professional gambling in a stock broker, a croupier, a bookmaker, or any other species involves some use of superior knowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the "chance" 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 the men employed in business 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 the 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 legally 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 his act is criminal as well as illegal 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 which extenuate 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.

HOW COMMERCE CONDONES CRIME.

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 intrusted 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 recent revelations of modern finance show 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 prospects of the promoters and managers of these companies.

WHEREIN SPECULATION DIFFERS.

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 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 employes 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 employe, 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.

WHEN IT WILL CEASE.

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 toward 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 with other movements of social and industrial reforms which aim simultaneously at the basis of 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.

GAMBLING DON'T PAY.

Two-fifths of all the crimes committed every year are estimated to be attributable to race tracks. Five men have been convicted this year of stealing money from the United States postoffice, and every one of them confessed he lost the money at race tracks. The mania for gambling is growing stronger, and as it grows the defenses of honesty crumble away.

What may be called gambling thieves are not so numerous in Chicago as in some other cities, for the reason that no race tracks are permitted to exist in Cook county. But there are many gambling swindlers in this city. A large proportion of the men in the county jail are there because gambling wrecked morals in them, and hardly a week passes that does not find at least one person before the courts charged with robbery because money was wanted to bet.

This is not all of the injury that gambling does to the community. Because the state's attorney's office and the police have not suppressed gambling the city is full of sharpers who make their living out of men foolish enough to think that they can get rich by betting on horse races, faro or roulette. These sharpers are an organized band of law breakers, preying on society, disorganizing it as far as is possible, their whole existence a menace to decency and order.

The passion for gambling can probably never be eradicated from human nature. But civilization should be able to prevent rogues and rascals from profiting by it in the way usual in Chicago. Professional gamblers--professional swindlers, should be sent to the penitentiary and kept there. There should be some means under the law to send all such to the penitentiary and keep them there.

HOW TO END RACE-TRACK GAMBLING.

Race-track gambling has unexpectedly become an issue of importance in New York, and widespread discussion of means to rid the city of its race tracks is taking place.

Discussion, however, is unnecessary. The way to end the plague of betting on races is plain. Let the grand jury indict officials of the Western Union Telegraph Company for complicity in bookmaking and send them to jail. Without gambling race tracks would be deserted. Without the aid of the Western Union there would be no gambling worth mentioning. Strike at the Western Union and the race tracks would go out of existence.

The Western Union Company is the one great encourager of gambling in this country. But for its reports of races, hundreds of thousands of young men would be saved from ruin every year. It is in partnership with sharpers who fleece the foolish. It shares their gains in payment for the use of its wires. The money that flows into its coffers from that source is taken by trickery from the public. The race track swindlers rob a man and hand over a part of their loot to the Western Union, because without the Western Union's assistance they could not have robbed him.

But for the Western Union Telegraph Company not a single race track would be in operation in the United States, for without the Western Union's aid race tracks would not be profitable.

The way to stop race tracks gambling and drive race courses out of existence is to compel the Western Union to observe the law which forbids just such practices as those of which it is guilty every day. That can be done only by sending a few Western Union officials to jail and keeping them there until their company concludes to dissolve partnership with crooks.

LEARN EARLY NOT TO GAMBLE; TEACH PUPILS LAW OF CHANCE.

Mere driftwood on a restless wave; A shuttlecock that's tossed by Fate; Year follows year into the grave, Whilst thou dost cry, "Too late! Too late!"

A life that's but a wintry day, Whilst chilling storms blow thee about; A tempter thou durst not say nay; A conscience long since put to rout.

Who gets by play a loser is; The gambler stakes his very heart; What's prodigally won's not his; Who wagers takes the knave's foul part.

Thou shouldst not steal nor covet what Another hath by labor earned; No man who hath with wisdom wrought But this base sport hath ever spurned.

Why haggard thus thy fair, young face With vigils, passions, aimed at gain? Is this thy mission in this place-- This idleness which brings disdain?

Be not a weakling, nor of wax; Let mind be master over thee; See that its shaping of thy acts Prepares thee for eternity!

Art thou thy brother's keeper?

Most emphatically, yes, if he be not sufficiently strong to refrain from doing that which is injurious to himself and those dependent upon him.

PUBLIC LAX; GAMBLERS ACTIVE.

When the law declares against gambling, and advertisement and sale of even "fair" gambling paraphernalia, why is it that the righteous majority, which would not stoop to this form of speculation, sits inertly by, allows crooked devices to be advertised and sold, permits hundreds of men to waste their time and substance, and dozens to blow out their brains as a consequence?

Why do "good" men prate on "personal liberty," which is merely their way of washing their hands of the responsibility for good government.

Does it eradicate the evil to say a man is a free moral agent and need not lose his money gambling unless he wants to; that "virtue is its own reward;" that "honesty is the best policy," or that taking without giving return is a sin?

Would it not be better for this inactive majority of talkers to elect incorruptible men who can do something besides talk--men who would enforce the laws and provide heavy punishments for concerns which make gambling machines in which the unsuspecting have absolutely no chance to win?

ARE WE FOLLOWING ROME TO THE PIT?

Are we going the way of Greece and Rome? Is there a menace in the rapid increase of wealth in the United States? Are we allowing the moral tone of society to sink?

The present tendency is toward speculation, even from childhood. In most cities the child barely able to walk can find slot machines in candy stores and drug stores from which he is made to believe he can get something for nothing. Is this the proper training to give children? Is it right to get something for which no return of money or labor is given? And is it right to thus lure children when adults know that their pennies more than pay for what they get--premiums and all?

Children in school should be taught to calculate probabilities as a part of their course in elementary arithmetic. Then they would know better than to play slot machines or buy prize packages. And when they grew up they would shun the bookmaker, the lottery, and the roulette wheel.

The ordinary gambler speculates partly because he loves the excitement and thrill of the game, but mainly, he will assure you, as he assures himself, he is buoyed up by the hope of winning. He does not stop to figure out his chances. If he sees a hundred to one shot he will play it, seeing only that by risking a dollar he has a chance to win a hundred. If he had been taught in school to see that really the chances were 200 to 1 against him, and that he was betting a dollar against fifty cents, he would keep his money in his pockets. Of course the man who plays the races knows the odds of the book are against him. He prides himself, however, that he is a wise reader of the "dope sheet," and that can overcome the odds by a superior cunning.

He knows that he can't win on his luck, for this "breaks even" in the long run.

FATE'S CARDS ALWAYS STACKED.

But the man who plays against a machine, if he has taken the elementary course in the law of probabilities, can suffer under no delusions and cannot give himself any reasonable excuse. He is bound to lose. The odds on the machine are against him. And even if they were not, it is entirely likely that the machine would win. An old gambler contends that if a man matched pennies all day every day for a month against a purely mechanical device he would quit a heavy loser. The only way he could keep even would be to start out with "heads" or "tails," and then go away and leave the machine at work, never changing his bet. If he remained to watch the operation he would, be sure to lose his head and begin to "guess" against the relentless mechanism, and then he would lose.