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.