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BETTING AND GAMBLING
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BETTING & GAMBLING
A National Evil
Edited by
B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE
Author of ‘Poverty’
London
Macmillan and Co., Limited
New York: The Macmillan Company
1905
All rights reserved
TO THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE YORK ANTI-GAMBLING
LEAGUE AT WHOSE SUGGESTION THIS WORK WAS UNDERTAKEN
PREFACE
Until comparatively recent years, betting and gambling were largely
confined in this country to the wealthy few. Now, however, the practice
has spread so widely among all classes of the community that those who
know the facts name gambling and drinking as national evils of almost
equal magnitude.
There is no doubt that the social conscience is as yet only very
partially awakened to the widespread character of the gambling evil
and to its grievous consequences. Like a cancer, the evil thing has
spread its poisonous roots throughout the length and breadth of the
land, carrying with them, where they strike, misery, poverty, weakened
character, and crime.
Nor is the practice any longer spontaneous. It is encouraged and
organised by an army of social parasites in the shape of bookmakers and
their touts; these men or women (for the “profession” is not confined to
men) pursue their calling in every town of Britain—indeed, there are
probably but few villages or large workshops which are free from them.
In many places, indeed, they regularly call for “orders,” the itinerant
packman or agent combining this with his recognised business. Even little
children have been known to bet their slate pencils in the playgrounds
of our State schools, while women and girls in all ranks of society no
longer regard the practice as unwomanly.
And yet, in spite of the acknowledged magnitude of the evil, there are,
with a very few notable exceptions, no organised efforts to check it.
The apparent apathy of the nation to the extraordinary spread of this
mischief in its midst is in sharp contrast to the great efforts organised
to combat intemperance. For this there are probably three main causes:—
1. Ignorance on the part of the general public as to the rapid
growth and the mischief of the practice.
2. Lack of clear thought regarding the ethics of the question.
3. The difficulty of suggesting practical steps to counteract
so insidious an evil.
The purpose of this book is to supply, in concise and readily accessible
form, information which may meet these needs. After a preliminary
chapter devoted to the ethics of Betting and Gambling, facts are stated
concerning the extent of the evil and its effects on national life. The
present position of legislation affecting betting is then dealt with, and
suggestions are made as to needed improvements in the law. A concluding
chapter considers remedial measures outside the sphere of legislation.
In the Appendix additional information is given, which, it is hoped, may
be useful, more particularly to speakers and writers, together with a
Bibliography of books and papers upon the subject. All the articles are
by writers who have given special attention to the topics with which they
deal. Three of them, viz. those by John A. Hobson, B. Seebohm Rowntree,
and “The Deluded Sportsman,” have appeared before. Two, though originally
written for this book, have appeared in periodicals which have a limited
circulation in this country, and the third has appeared in pamphlet form.
B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE.
YORK, _April 1905_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE ETHICS OF GAMBLING 1
JOHN A. HOBSON, M.A.
THE EXTENT OF GAMBLING 21
JOHN HAWKE, Hon. Sec. National Anti-Gambling League.
STOCK EXCHANGE GAMBLING 45
A. J. WILSON, Editor _Investor’s Review_.
GAMBLING AMONG WOMEN 69
J. M. HOGGE, M.A.
CRIME AND GAMBLING 84
CANON HORSLEY.
THE DELUDED SPORTSMAN 92
A BOOKMAKER.
GAMBLING AND CITIZENSHIP 117
J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, Sec. Labour Representation Committee.
EXISTING LEGISLATION 135
JOHN HAWKE.
THE REPRESSION OF GAMBLING 170
B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE.
APPENDICES—
1. LORDS’ RECOMMENDATIONS, June 1902 191
2. LORD DAVEY’S STREET BETTING BILL, 1903 199
3. SUMMARY OF LORDS’ COMMISSION 203
4. OPINIONS OF EMINENT MEN ON BETTING 213
5. A NOTE ON PEDESTRIANISM 219
6. TIPSTERS AND TIPSTERS’ ADVERTISEMENTS 222
7. BETTING STATISTICS 232
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 236
INDEX 245
THE ETHICS OF GAMBLING
By JOHN A. HOBSON
Gambling is the determination of the ownership of property by appeal to
chance. By chance is here implied the resultant of a play of natural
forces that cannot be controlled or calculated by those who appeal to it.
In tossing “heads or tails” for the possession of a coin, neither party
has any knowledge or control of the adjustment of forces which determines
upon which side the coin will fall, or if by practice the tosser acquires
such knowledge or control, he cannot possibly predict or control the
“call” of his opponent, which thus keeps the determination of the issue
within the realm of “Chance.”
Gambling may be described as “pure” or “mixed” according as the
determining power of chance is or is not blended with other powers. Few
so-called games of chance are entirely destitute of skill, even if the
skill consists entirely of speed or accuracy in calculating “chances.”
Where such skill plays a large and a continuous part, the game ceases to
be classed as “gambling,” though chance may exercise a quite considerable
influence in determining the result. In betting on horse-races and in
commercial gambling superior knowledge of some of the determinant causes
may so qualify the chance that, from the standpoint of those who have
such knowledge, the operation ceases to be gambling. If such knowledge
is equally attainable by all those who “speculate,” the game becomes one
of skill; if it consists in genuine “tips” or private knowledge, the
operation is fraudulent. This last fact is generally recognised: all
gamesters denounce betting on “certainties.” Again, both on the turf
and the stock exchange chance may be reduced or even eliminated by an
actual manipulation of the forces so as to yield a result favourable to
the interests of some of those who pose as gamblers. But when the result
supposed to rest on chance is known or controlled by any sort of skill,
fraud, or force, the case is not one of pure gambling; for though it
is a matter of significance that gambling commonly keeps company with
cheating, the latter is not gambling.
Where the skilful draftsmanship of a lottery prospectus allures the dull
or sanguine reader into staking his money, by deceiving him as to the
size of his chance of winning, such trickery, though designed to appeal
to the gambling instinct of investors, is not itself an act or a part of
gambling: it is simply fraud, though not necessarily fraud in a legal
sense.
On the other hand, when the terms of a lottery are clearly understood by
those who stake their money, the mere fact that the managers arrange
the speculation so as to procure for themselves a known and certain
gain, offering prizes admittedly of less value than the aggregate of
the stakes, need not debar us from regarding the proceeding as “pure
gambling” so far as the players are concerned. So with the roulette-table
at Monte Carlo: the players are aware that the chances are favourable
to the bank over a prolonged piece of play, they even know the precise
amount of this bias. But this knowledge does not prevent their play from
ranking as pure gambling, for no skill or knowledge or trickery on their
part can enter in as a determinant of the result.
Thus an honestly managed lottery, or roulette, may fairly serve as a type
of pure gambling which will serve to enable us to test the psychology and
ethics of the proceeding.
Before approaching the distinctively moral aspects of gambling, we
must clearly realise its intellectual reactions. The rational basis
of the acquisition of property is the “natural” relation of effort to
satisfaction. A man who converts an unshaped piece of matter into an
object of human utility may be said to have a “natural” property in
it. And this in a double sense. The expenditure of human energy given
out in this piece of labour requires recuperation: this recuperation
is achieved by “consuming” that which he has made, or its equivalent
obtained by processes of equal exchange. The effort of production
requires the satisfaction of consumption. Thus it is commonly recognised
that labour, or human effort, is the natural basis of the right of
property. Or, regarding the same relation on its psychical side with
reference to motive, we perceive that a property in that which he has
made must be accorded to the maker wherever any painful effort of
production is required, in order to induce his will to sanction the
effort. In a society where social forces co-operate with individual
effort a _full_ property in that which a man is said to make may not
be essential, but that is because no man working in society and for a
market can truly be said to make the whole of anything, much less its
“value” when it is made. But everywhere some proportion of property must
be guaranteed to the individual who is required to exert himself in
productive labour. Any form of theft, fraud, extortion, “sweating,” on
the part of individuals or governments, is liable to interfere with this
physical and psychical adjustment between production and consumption,
output of effort and intake of satisfaction, which forms the natural
or rational basis of individual property. Just in proportion as this
rational character is firmly and clearly stamped upon the processes
of the acquisition of property do we possess security of social order
and progress. When property comes to any one in any other way, its
transfer has an “unreasonable” character. So a society where force or
fraud habitually or frequently displaces this sane process of acquiring
property, where some persons eat bread _sudore vultus alieni_ and others
consequently sweat without eating, is not only economically enfeebled,
but is irrationally constituted. And this unreason in the social organism
corrupts and derationalises the individual members. But even an unjustly
ordered society, where the domination of one class is accompanied by the
subjection of another, where organised parasitism or plunder prevails,
differs from “anarchy” as regards its reactions upon the intelligence
of man. A bad system, the worst of systems, is less derationalising
than no system. So the habitual exploitation of the poor by the rich,
the “have-nots” by the “haves,” though substantially irrational in the
modes of acquisition of property involved, is less demoralising than the
abandonment of the determination of property to pure chance.
Gambling involves the denial of all system in the apportionment of
property: it plunges the mind in a world of anarchy, where things come
upon one and pass from one miraculously. It does not so manifestly sin
against the canons of justice as do other bad modes of transfer,—theft,
fraud, sweating,—for every one is said to have an equal chance; but it
inflicts a graver damage on the intellect. Based as it is on an organised
rejection of all reason as a factor, it removes its devotees into a
positive atmosphere of miracles, and generates an emotional excitement
that inhibits those checks which reason more or less contrives to place
upon emotional extravagances. The essence of gambling consists in an
abandonment of reason, an inhibition of the factors of human control.
In the history of mankind, civilisation of the individual has chiefly
consisted in and been measured by this increased capacity of rational
control—a slow, gradual, imperfect taming of the animal instincts which
made for emotional anarchy of conduct.
This assertion of rational control, implying some sort of plan in life,
restraints on conduct, and trust in orderly processes of phenomena, has
doubtless been most imperfectly established even in the picked members of
the more highly civilised races. But such as it is, it represents order
in society and progress in humanity.
The practice of gambling is thus exhibited as a deliberate reversion
to those passions and that mental attitude which characterise the
savage or pre-human man in his conduct and his outlook. There lurk in
“civilised” man the remnants of survivals of countless ages of pre-human
and of savage heredity, anarchic passions associated with barbarous
superstitions. The order of civilisation claims to have killed or
atrophied the grosser forms of these atavistic tendencies, but many of
them are not dead; social control and education of individual habits
keeps them in subordination or acquiescence, but on temptation they are
ready to awake. Just as war and certain forms of sport can call from the
caverns of heredity brutish traits whose presence was utterly unknown to
their possessors, so the interest of gambling discovers in many natures a
similarly fatal inheritance.
Maeterlinck has recently sought to find a quasi-rational basis for
“luck” in the occasional revival of certain primitive instincts of
self-protection which, seldom needed in the higher progress of humanity,
have died down and rarely assert themselves. Whether such latent powers
of extra-rational warning exist or ever did exist, we need not here
discuss; it is, however, quite evident that the widespread belief in
“luck” among gamblers is a reversion to a form of unreason which carries
no sound instinct of direction with it. It is fair to adduce this belief
in luck as an important testimony to the derationalising influences of
gambling.
It does not seem true that the gambling habit pervades only or chiefly
the least intelligent types of men. Among habitual gamblers on the
stock exchange, on the turf and in the card-room, and wherever skill
tempers chance, high degrees of cunning, memory, and judgment are often
found, while certain qualities of determination and of self-command are
conducive to success. But while many men possessing these qualities are
drawn to games or business pursuits where a strong element of chance is
present, there is no real affinity between any of these personal powers
and pure gambling. It is not, for instance, true that skill, judgment,
or self-command is of the least assistance at the roulette-table or at
rouge-et-noir. The fact that these qualities are so commonly regarded as
serviceable to the player may be cited as a conspicuous evidence of the
derationalising influence of gambling even in the case of those who do
not gamble. For in reality they are only useful in proportion as the game
is not pure gambling.
The curious cunning expended in devising “systems” and the attention to
multifarious incidents of “luck” indicate a genuine inhibition of the
reasoning faculty. Both modes of manipulating chance are vitiated by the
same two fallacies. Belief in the efficacy of a “system” implies that a
series of consecutive coups is a causally connected chain, whereas, in
fact, the result of each coup is entirely unaffected by the coup which
preceded or follows it. The “system” gambler also believes that he is
able to forecast to some extent the drift or current of chances which
makes this causal connection. Similarly with the cruder superstitions,
such as the notion that a virgin player will win his opening bout of
play, or that turning one’s chair or changing one’s seat will break
a spell of bad luck: they also imply that a sequence of separately
determined events is in some unintelligible way a mutually determined
group, and that a tendency running through the series can be altered
by a casual or purposed action which is interjected from outside. The
amazing hold which these superstitious notions obtain over persons of
education and intelligence is a striking testimony to the intellectual
havoc wrought by gambling. How insidious is the illusion about runs of
luck may be shown by the ease with which the minds of most persons, who
are averse to gambling and would deride the notion of a “system,” fall
into the snare when it is set in the following form: Enter a room where
rouge-et-noir is going on and learn that red has turned up twenty times
in succession, when the next card is in the act of being drawn there is
an almost irresistible tendency to expect black, from a first impulsive
judgment which has false reference to the general improbability of red
turning up twenty-one times running. Most persons, including trained
scientists to whom I have put the case, requiring an immediate reply,
have admitted that they would be disposed to bet against red.
A practice so corrupting to the intelligence not only of the habitué but
even of the casual spectator stands condemned as a formidable enemy of
education and of intellectual order.
In thus exposing the irrationality of gambling, both as a mode of
transferring property and as a mental occupation, I have implicitly
exposed its immorality also. Its repudiation of equitable order involves
at once an intellectual and a moral descent to a lower plane of thought
and feeling. Perhaps no other human interest, not based on purely
physical craving, arouses so absorbing a passion: alcoholism itself
scarcely asserts a stronger dominion over its devotees.
So widespread has been the zest for gambling among whole races as widely
different in character and environment as the British, the Zulu, the
Chinese, that we are almost driven to seek some physiological root
for the passion. To give an added weight of interest to chance by
attaching to it a transfer of property seems to imply a love of hazard
as a permanent feature in humanity. Though the transfer of property by
gambling not merely feeds the passion but imports grave moral injuries of
its own, it cannot be said to originate gambling or to be essential to
the play of the interest in chance or hazard. The folly and the social
injury of gambling grow with the proportion of the stakes; but high
stakes, while they concentrate and dramatise the play, do not create the
interest.
Educationalists and other reformers who would exorcise the gambling
habit must look deeper for its origin and early sustenance. The fevered
excitement of the gambler is part of an exaggerated reaction against
certain excesses of orderly routine imposed upon the life in which he
lives. The dull, prolonged monotony of uninteresting drudgery which
constitutes the normal workaday life of large masses of people drives
them to sensational reactions which are crude and violent. The factory
employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members
of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting
order, of mechanism, in their working day. Their work affords no
considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression, and the interest,
achievement, and surprise which are ordinary human qualities. It is
easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however well-ordered) human
life would be vacant of interest and intolerable: in other words, it is a
prime condition of humanity that the unexpected in the form of happening
and achievement should be adequately represented in every life. Art
in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, and play, as
interested but unproductive effort, are essential. But where either the
physical or mental exhaustion of industry, or other external conditions,
prevent the due cultivation or the expression of wholesome art or play
instincts, baser attractions usurp their place. It is impossible, and it
would be undesirable, to deny to man the satisfaction of his instinctive
zest in the unexpected, the hazardous, the disorderly: he needs not only
achievement but accident to sustain his interest in life. The latter
factor may yield largely to the former in highly civilised man, in a
society where varied modes of art offer varied stimuli to self-expression
and achievement: the artist who is a true artist is least likely to be a
gambler. But a margin of disorder, or hazard and unreason, will always
remain a factor in the interest of life: hence an element of unordered
play as distinct from art will always survive.
Even a moral order imposed in the public interest, if too uniform and
rigorous, will arouse, not merely in bad but in good natures, reactions
towards lawlessness. There is much truth in what Charles Lamb wrote of
his interest in the Seventeenth Century Comedy:—
I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to
answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond
the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the
precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while
or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get
into recesses where the hunter cannot follow me—I am back to my
cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it.
So it is with all sorts and conditions of men: the incalculable, the
lawless remains an ineradicable factor in life.
Where there is little or no provision of or stimulus to art, the crudest
and most sensational play tends to absorb the entire margin of energy
left after work is done.
In such a state of society every field of activity capable of generating
such elements of hazard is pressed into the service of gambling: sports
and business occupations become popular in proportion as they can by
their structure be made to minister to the craving for hazard; every sort
of competition where a sufficient element of the incalculable exists is
pervaded by gambling.
If the monotony of toil drives large numbers of workers to seek violent
sensational relief in gambling, the ennui of idleness prompts the
leisured classes to the same abuse. A totally or partially parasitic life
(where little or no socially directed labour is imposed), though leaving
a large margin of free energy, makes more for dilettantism than for art,
and depriving play of its healthy interest as a relief from work induces
a “boredom” which fosters gambling among other sensational extravagances.
Moreover in the rich, leisured class the disproportion between earning
and spending loosens the just sense of property more than in any other
class, so that large miraculous transfers of property by betting seem
less discrepant with the ordinary conditions of their life.
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.