For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Fainting behind her ineffectual shield; My song, my soul, my very self attune, And glorious dreamings, shrouded now from sight, Dawn out of darkness, not to sleep for aye. From The Quarterly Review. grave mistake to suppose that the lower classes have no canon of taste. It would be easy, were the task before us, to give many instances affording incontestable proof that the working classes of Great Britain have an abundance of fine feeling, which operates largely on their habits and modes of life. Already there are many signs that this influence is working effectually on the side of temperance, and that the day is coming when it will be as bad form for a working man or artisan to get drunk, as it is for a member of those classes whose example is still powerful for good or evil. It is to the same influence that we must look for the discouragement of an even more baneful habit. That influence is at present absolutely quiescent, and vigorous efforts are apparently needed to rouse it. For we have good reasons for thinking that there never was a time when the taste ONE of the most fully attended sectiona! meetings of the recent Church Congress was devoted to a discussion of gambling and betting. The Town Hall was filled to overflowing, and more numbers than the hall could accommodate desired to listen to the onslaught of learned clerical speakers on the evils of the most prevalent vice of the age. The inability of the Church itself to cope with the mischief was fully admitted. The idea of the formation of a society to attempt the task was mentioned only to be rejected, and speaker after speaker cited public opinion as the only real power. Such an admission is in itself somewhat remarkable. Time was when the Church of England would have recognized no such inability. Even now we are by no means sure that all the religious communities of the United Kingdom would for gambling was more widespread than it allow, that the work of discountenancing is now. It has, in fact, become a trade or or even putting down a mischievous social habit was beyond their powers. But the Church is much in earnest in this question, and wisely seeks a strong alliance. Lay opinion did more to put an end to drunkenness in the upper classes of society than pulpit oratory. Men in the higher and middle ranks have long ceased to drink more wine than was good for them; but they have been moved to the abandonment of a custom of their forefathers, less by a feeling that it offended against morality or religion, than by the opinion that it offended against good taste. If the lower classes once brought to understand that drunkenness is ungentlemanlike, drunkenness will disappear. Let it come to be admitted that a man who drinks too much is not a very fine fellow but a contemptible fool; and first public, and then private, intoxication will become a thing of the past. It is a are profession. It is not so much that cards and dice abound, as that betting is universal. Every class of society, from the highest to the lowest, is more or less affected with a mania for betting, for the development of which there are unhappily ample opportunities. To what extent these opportunities prevail, and what has been their recent development, we propose presently to discuss. Meanwhile a brief glance at gambling as a whole may not be without interest. Gambling has been condemned by ethical authorities of many generations. Aristotle classes the gambler with the thief and the robber; and we can well imagine the loathing which the philosopher, who hated even usury, had for so useless a means of seeking wealth. Blackstone calls gaming “a kind of tacit confession that the company engaged therein do in general exceed the bounds of their respective fortunes; and therefore they cast lots to determine upon whom the ruin shall at present fall, that the rest may be saved a little longer." And Burton devotes a whole chapter of his "Anatomy of Melan * ὁ μέν τοι κυβευτής καὶ ὁ λωποδύτης καὶ ὁ λῃστὴς τῶν ἀνελευθέρων εἰσὶν, αἰσχροχερδεῖς γάρ. (Aristot. Eth. Nic. iv. 1, § 43-) choly" to a vigorous denunciation of gambler adopts to gain his end lies in this gaming.* What is gambling and what is its wrong? A learned writer of modern days condemns the gambler on the ground that he desires to acquire without earning. But this answer will not bear close examination. The man who invests money in consols acquires without earning, and if earning were made a condition of acquisition, the employment of capital would be impossible in all cases where the capitalist was unable to supervise its employment. Nor does the evil lie in the risk. At times enormous profits are made by trading. Hallam† asserts that the interest of money was exceedingly high throughout the Middle Ages. He quotes a speech of Doge Mocenigo, reckoning the annual profit made by Venice on her mercantile capital at forty per cent. The speculator, who buys largely in one part of the world goods which he hopes to sell at a profit in another, runs grave risk. The miner, who spends all his wealth in prospecting for a valuable metal, runs grave risk. In every one of the myriad fields of commerce, there is hazard in the working, and ruin, as utter and as ghastly as any which has whelmed the gambler, may at any time overthrow the honest but unsuccessful tradesman. Nevertheless, though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, it is not gambling. Its harm is not ejusdem generis. Gambling may be said to be the risking of larger sums than a man can afford, on ventures over which his own industry can exercise little or no control. And its evil lies in this. When two or more men gamble, the winners win and the losers lose, but there is no possible benefit to any one else, except maybe the owner of the building where they play. Commerce, even when wildly speculative, benefits some one. But by gambling no good is done to the world. In this fact lies the aloxpoxepdɛía of the gambler. He spends his time and his energies in that which can be of no good. As a matter of fact, as we shall hereafter show, it is productive of enormous evil. But the disgrace of the means which the • Anatomy of Melancholy, iv., c. 13, 8. ↑ Hallam's Middle Ages, vol. iii., p. 337, ed. 1860. essential, that it benefits no one. It is a pure waste of time. Gambling has prevailed in every era and in every clime. Casting of lots was frequently adopted by the Israelites; Saul being thus chosen for one destiny, and Jonah for another. "The Hindoo code," says Steinmetz, "a promulgation of very high antiquity, denounces gambling." Herodotus † refers to a story told by the priests of Egypt, that one of their kings gambled with Demeter in the infernal regions; and Plutarch ‡ relates a fable of Hermes gambling with the moon. In China gambling prevailed from the earliest times, and cards were known to the Chinese long ere they were introduced into Europe. Steinmetz tells us that the Greenlanders gamble with a board and a revolving finger-piece, and that the African negro uses shells as dice. Many Indian tribes of North America are determined gamblers. The Mahabharata, the old Hindoo epic, describes a gambling match between Yudhishthiva, chief warrior of the Pandavas, and Satruni, prince of the Kauravas, in which the latter by cheating won all the possessions of the former, including a lovely queen, with the result of a mur derous conflict. In Persia, dicing was a fashionable diversion, and Plutarch § relates a story of Parysatis, mother of Cyrus, who played with the king her husband for the slave who had slain her son, and inasmuch as she excelled at playing a certain game with dice, won him; a statement which seems to point to the conclusion that, even in such early days and such high society, the operations of chance were not always left uncontrolled. In Greece, gambling prevailed to a vast extent. Homer describes Penelope's suitors as playing at draughts, and Patroclus lost his temper at dice.¶ We have mentioned Aristotle's cold censure. Steinmetz quotes Callistratus's condemnation of high play, the games in and Maint gentilshommes tres hault Jouers experts deviennent Rufien which the losers go on doubling their teenth century, Alphonso of Castille enstakes, resemble ever-recurring wars deavored to prevent gambling by founding which terminate only with the extinction an order of chivalry in which it was forof the combatants. The Romans loved bidden; and later, John of Castille atgambling with tessera and talus, and tempted to do the same by edict. In spite betted largely on the circenses. Augustus of several lukewarm attempts to prevent had and deserved the reputation of a gam-it, gambling ever throve in France. bler, though he did not mind it, aleœ_ru- | Charles VI. lost five thousand livres one morem nullo modo expavit.* Claudius day to his brother. In the reign of that played eagerly, and wrote a treatise upon monarch flourished the Hôtel de Nesle, gambling. Seneca fancies Claudius in where the lower regions condemned to play dice with a box without a bottom. Domitian often played all day long, and many of the other emperors did the same. Oddly enough, Horace nowhere pours on gambling the scathing satire with which he lashes other vices; the reason may have been that so many of his patrons played, or did he "compound the sin he was inclined to"? The fact, however, remains that one allusion to vetita legibus alea § is his only reference. Even Juvenal scourges gambling lightly, using rather the scutica than the horribile flagellum, and condemns the selfishness of high play rather than the habit of playing at all. Sallust attributes to Catiline the friendship and the following of men who by gambling had dissipated their inheritance. All gambling was forbidden by Justinian,¶ and earlier the penalty of infamia seems to have been incurred by those who were convicted of gaming.** But games of chance were lawful at the Saturnalia, and public opinion allowed old men to amuse themselves thus. tt There can be no doubt, however, that the gambler was, in the republic at least, held in disrepute. Coming to more recent times, and to nearer countries, we find that in the four and to the same reign is attributed, not The well-known For a long while the invention of cards was believed to have occurred in the reign of Charles VI. in consequence of the researches of Père Menestrier, who found a memoir on the subject of some cards painted by Gringonneur, from which he assumed that these cards were the first examples. But traces of much earlier cards have been discovered, and there are many reasons, too long to examine, for the opinion that cards were introduced into Europe by the Gipsies or Zingari somewhere in the thirteenth century. |