easy. For social conduct is the inheritance of complicated experiences,
retained only by sleepless vigilance, and exercised by the subordination
of the individual will to the social conscience. It is therefore
comparable to those high forms of chemical compounds built up of many
atoms but exceedingly unstable. The simple presence of a disturbing
element shatters the compound and reduces it to its primitive atoms.
Man’s self-regarding and primitive instincts are constantly threatening
to disjoint his social character and defeat all movements depending upon
that character for their success. To hope, for instance, that a labour
party can be built up in a population quivering from an indulgence in
games of hazard is folly. Such a population cannot be organised for
sustained political effort, cannot be depended upon for legal support
to its political champions, cannot respond to appeals to its rational
imagination. Its hazards absorb so much of its leisure; they lead it away
from thoughts of social righteousness; they destroy in it the sense of
social service; they create in it a state of mind which believes in fate,
luck, the irrational, the erratic; they dazzle its eyes with flashing
hopes; they make it, in other words, absolutely incapable of taking an
interest in the methods and the aims of reforming politicians. They lay
it open to the seductions of the demagogue, to the blandishments of the
hail-fellow-well-met type of candidate, to the inducements of the common
briber, to the flashy clap-trap of the vulgar and the ignorant charlatan.
And the discovery that such classes exist in the community will very
soon be made, and the whole tone of public life lowered to suit their
tastes. It is not without serious significance that in recent elections
one of the most common forms of argument (sometimes used by both sides)
has been an offer by the candidates to back up statements they had made
by sums of money. “It is not so much,” says Loria, the eminent Italian
sociologist, “the personality of the elected as the character of the
class which elects that really counts.” I do not say that this is to lead
to rapid and irretrievable ruin. Rome bore the burden of a luxurious and
gambling class of citizens for centuries. But I do say that the spread of
the gambling habit is one of the most disquieting events of the time for
those particularly who believe in self-government and in an intelligent
democracy using its political power to secure moral and social ends.
Every labour leader I know recognises the gambling spirit as a menace to
any form of labour party.
III
I have, finally, to consider what good citizenship has to say to
gambling, and how it proposes to deal with the matter.
We must remember that this, like so many other vices, is only a degraded
and degrading form of expressing a natural human need. Indulgence
in gambling is universal in primitive society, where it is closely
associated with religion, and at no time is it absent from the larger and
more absorbing transactions of civilised life. It is intimately connected
with the dominating type of will and the unflinching determination of men
to control. The gigantic strides which the United States have made in
industry have been possible only because the Americans have not flinched
in facing enormous hazards. This spirit finds apt expression in the
verse of that romantic embodiment of the love of hazard, the Marquis of
Montrose—
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who does not put it to the touch,
Or gain or lose it all.
In the evolution of the race an important part has no doubt been played
by the men and the communities whose self-confidence was sufficiently
strong to enable them to make large drafts upon the unknown. Abnormally
and respectably—as in the form of genius—this spirit gives us “the man of
destiny”; abnormally but not respectably—as in the form of burglary—this
spirit gives us the high criminal. Normally, properly controlled and
toned, it gives us the successful man of business, the leader and
inspirer of men. This playing with the unknown in the faith that the
fates are favourably disposed has undoubtedly been, and is still to be,
a very important spur to energy, and one of the determining factors in
national survivals in the future. Indeed, it is inseparable from human
nature. Men will not tolerate a uniform drudgery, they will not live in a
world which is nothing but a featureless expanse. And this intellectual
appetite for risk, for projecting one’s self on to the silent stream of
fate upon which the barque of life mysteriously floats, must be satisfied
either legitimately or illegitimately, either in accordance with sound
morals or in the teeth of sound morals. The latter will be the case if
we condemn, as we do now, large sections of our population to conditions
of life from which their intellectual nature can get no satisfaction.
The appetites of that nature will not die away. Its functions will
not atrophy and degenerate. It will simply accommodate itself to its
circumstances. If it cannot command the food of the gods, it will fill
its belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and find a troubled
satisfaction in its degradation. “To be confined in the dark, or without
occupation, is to be made the victim of subjective tedium,” says Bain.[7]
We have confined our people in the dark, and they are gambling to break
the tedium.
Consequently, when we consider the responsibilities of citizenship for
the spread of the gambling disease with a view to devising some cure, we
shall have to begin by assuming that prohibitive Acts will not carry us
very far. We can stop bookmakers or their agents receiving bets in the
public streets or any public place; we can turn them off race-courses and
refuse to recognise any enclosure as sanctuary. We can even go further,
and prosecute any one who receives from another betting payments on any
event whatever. This last would be going very far—too far, perhaps, to be
practical. But at any rate we could prohibit the receipt of money from
children. We could also stop the publication of betting news, and our
Post Office could refuse to transmit circulars encouraging the gambling
appetite.[8] We might even combat successfully the much more difficult
problem of how to prohibit gambling at church and chapel bazaars. But,
when we have done all that, we have not gone very far. We have simply
restored life to its old, dull, monotonous drab, and we have turned the
natural instincts which the gambling habit satisfies from feeding at
one trough to find husks in another. To the great mass of the people we
shall but appear to be smug Pharisees, and a reaction will set in which
in its aggressive strength will play much greater havoc than even the
steady growth of the disease before it was challenged. Time after time
the failure of the reform campaigns of outraged respectability in America
has taught this simple lesson in moral politics. One cannot devastate and
then say, “Behold the good!” The gambling habit must be elbowed out, not
stamped out.
I would be exceeding the purposes and limits of this paper did I attempt
to sketch a programme of reforms which in my opinion would do the
elbowing. I can only indicate the skeleton of such a programme, and I do
so, not so much to urge my readers to accept it, as to emphasise that the
attack upon the gambling habit can be successful only if it is positive
and constructive, and not merely negative and prohibitory.
When we try to get to the root of our social vices of to-day we
ultimately find ourselves contemplating the sad effects of the steady
stream of population away from the green meadows on to the grey
pavements. Overcrowding in the towns and dilapidation in the villages
are the result. At best, under existing conditions there must always be
a fringe of our city population living from hand to mouth, contracting
the character of the casual and the loafer. But this fringe is made
much broader by the present urban immigration; the tarnished threads in
it are of finer quality than they would be otherwise, and the original
excellence of some of its stuff makes it all the more prone to vices of
certain kinds. The problem which good citizenship has to solve then, it
seems to me, is twofold. It has to discover how people can be induced to
stay on the land, and how, in towns, they can be provided with proper
surroundings. The only hope of a rural population in England is the
spread of intensive cultivation and of co-operative agriculture,[9]
and that again can hardly become general until our present system of
landlordism is broken up and public authorities own the land and let it
to suit the convenience of cultivators.
The town problems must be solved by a combination of public and private
associated effort. We must give up all hope of private owners being able
to supply decent houses at reasonable rents. The municipality should
become the sole housing authority within its own area, and where it
spreads out its arms of tramways beyond its own boundaries it should be
able to develop building estates on its lines of communication. With a
housing and tram policy should be combined a recreation policy, for it is
the lack of recreation in modern city life which leads to so many vicious
indulgences. Parks, music, museums, libraries, hardly touch the needs of
the workman no longer on the sunny side of thirty-five, wearied after a
day’s work. The public-house or the workman’s club is his resort.
Here we come to the centre of our difficulty. We cannot meet the needs
of the average workman who is not a teetotaller unless we place the
public-house under public control. This seems to me to be the first step,
not only towards national temperance, but towards the provision of that
rational amusement which is to protect our industrial population from
vicious allurements.[10]
But when all these facilities for an intellectual life have been
provided, they will be in danger of being neglected unless the people who
are supposed to benefit by them are led to pursue worthy human ideals.
The appreciation of the worthy is an inward quality. Here we come to the
saving grace of political convictions, the purifying effect of citizen
ideals. An immunity from anti-social indulgences depends upon the general
diffusion through society of an active desire for social improvement by
democratic means. This acts in two ways. It first of all quickens the
social conscience and the moral pride of the common man, and it also
safeguards him from imitating the vices of the worthless upper classes,
which, without the opposition of a strong democratic spirit, become the
models for the recreation and amusement of the masses.
Hence, turning once more for a moment to consider the causes which have
led to the present slackening of moral fibre, I find one of the most
important to be the loss of the democratic fervour which characterised
the people during about three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The
people have lost taste for politics. The generous enthusiasms of 1848
are criticised by the aged youth of our schools to-day as having been
over-sentimental and mere dreams. At any rate, they gave us sound
literature—Tait’s _Edinburgh Magazine_, Chambers’s _Papers for the
People_, Cassell’s _Popular Educator_; they laid the foundations of a
most important part of democratic education in the Mechanics’ Institutes;
they gave birth to a self-reliant generation of working men. Until
citizenship, radiantly setting out towards the splendour of a perfected
humanity, attended by a train of the beatitudes which the heart and mind
of man have been ever seeking, commands the allegiance and the services
of our people, the crowd, obedient to the necessity to worship imposed
upon it by its nature, will bow to false gods; and men, obedient to their
intellectual promptings to dally occasionally in the temple of Fortuna,
will do so in the gross, the only, way which is at present possible for
them.
EXISTING LEGISLATION
By JOHN HAWKE
When the intelligent public has become convinced of the existence of a
great social evil, it wants to know, in the first place, what laws are in
existence which can be applied in remedy of it, and what amendments of
the law are needed.
The text-books upon the present laws, through no fault of their authors,
are somewhat obsolete, owing to recent not altogether consistent
decisions of the Courts, although _Law Relating to Betting_, by G. H.
Stutfield, and _Law of Gambling_ (Coldridge and Hawksford), contain
much valuable information. The following summary is intended to present
a skeleton view of the legal position at this date, and for sake of
convenience the subject is divided under the two heads of Miscellaneous
Gambling and Betting. Whichever portion of the subject is treated, it
will be observed that the laws are both inadequate and not fully applied.
Miscellaneous gambling must be subdivided into (M) all kinds of
individual gaming unconnected with trade; (N) gambling in the stock,
produce, and other markets.
MISCELLANEOUS GAMBLING
M. _Individual Gaming unconnected with Trade_
(_a_) Illegal Games.
(_b_) Card Playing.
(_c_) Playing with Gaming-Machines.
(_d_) Lotteries and Sweepstakes.
(_e_) Press Competitions and Coupon Gambling.
(_f_) Gambling Clubs.
(_g_) Petty Gambling.
_(a) Illegal Games; (b) Card Playing._—The old-time absurdity of making
certain games illegal, because they were the ones chiefly used as
vehicles for gambling and left little room for skill, seems to have
resulted in throwing upon the Courts the difficult task of deciding what
other games come near enough to this class to share their disabilities,
and to have culminated in shaping the law in a direction very unfortunate
for public morality, so as to present a modicum of skill as a sufficient
leaven to create immunity for a very large element of chance. The
gambler avoids, as a rule, the named illegal games and turns to others.
Blackstone remarks upon his infinite shifts and the varieties of his
expedients, so that to pass laws especially applying to some games only
merely drives him into other courses.
The true principle is that no game in itself is illegal, but that the
gambling upon it may be. While the present laws make special regulations
and enforce specific penalties upon certain games, others which may
easily be as noxious cannot be dealt with. Consequently we have spasmodic
and partial attempts to enforce the law, and a series of enigmatic and
conflicting decisions in the Courts, resulting in a chaotic state of
affairs in which little check is put upon gamblers.
_(c) Playing with Gaming-Machines._—Notwithstanding that roulette is an
illegal lottery, it is an unhappy fact that of late years it has been
much more played than formerly. An inspection of tradesmen’s catalogues,
and a glance round the departments at the stores, tends to confirm the
impression that it and like games are becoming much more common. A member
of the Bar who many years ago took the silk gown, and who was known to be
averse to gambling, although going a good deal into society, has noticed
how often the green cloth appears not long after dinner, sometimes after
a postponement until he and those of like mind are about to leave. Its
public use may have been put down, but in private houses and in clubs
the roulette-table has multiplied its numbers. Here again, in connection
with gaming-machines, corruption has spread and gone lower down. The
automatic machines, at first used for the sale of sweetmeats, have been
altered so as to be made the vehicles of gambling amongst the poorer
classes, and especially children. They have already done irretrievable
harm. Investigating the subject in the East End of London, the writer of
these lines was told by a responsible person that they had taken such a
hold upon the young that, while in classes of poor boys comparatively
little difficulty was found in obtaining pledges not to drink and smoke,
much reluctance has been evinced with regard to promises to give up petty
gambling. Upon one occasion a bright boy flatly declined to add such a
pledge to others, saying that he could not give up the excitement of
using his coppers in this way. Most of the police prosecutions have been
successful, and fines have been imposed under sec. 44 of the Police Act;
while the machines were without hesitation pronounced to be illegal upon
licensed premises. It may be hoped that the latest decision in _Fielding_
v. _Turner_ in the Divisional Court will go far towards stopping their
use for gambling, now that they can be confiscated. So serious a matter
had they become that the Home Secretary has promised to strengthen the
law if need be. But the eagerness with which the temptation they offer
has been responded to by the poorest of children should be a warning to
the authorities against the old looseness of interpretation in the matter
of laws against gambling. For children, at least, the old nonsense about
skill and chance should be entirely swept away, and severe penalties
enforced against all those who tempt the young in this manner. If not,
the growing generation will be worse in gambling than the present one,
and instead of a nation with a large minority devoted to the vice, it
will develop into a general habit in which the majority are involved in
one form or another.
_(d) Lotteries and Sweepstakes._—Lotteries are matters of pure chance,
which have been gradually restricted by a long series of statutory
enactments; and in 1823 the last form, that of the public lottery, was
abolished, the sole remaining exception being the ones connected with
Art Unions, which have since been discontinued. Lotteries were found to
be debauching the public and affording opportunities for fraud, but have
not been wholly got rid of, as they are still carried on in connection
with charity bazaars and in the form of sweepstakes, chiefly held upon
horse-races. These latter, when subscribed privately and in clubs, are
winked at by the authorities, but fitful prosecutions against publicans
and others are heard of from time to time. Bazaar raffles, “fish-ponds,”
etc., are no less illegal lotteries than sweepstakes under the Lottery
Acts; they come within the provisions of 12 Geo. II. c. 28. It has,
unfortunately, become customary for the authorities to take no action
when raffles are held for charitable purposes, but all the churches of
late years have been condemning the practice, and it is coming to be
looked upon as a disreputable one, so that the law might now be enforced
without any serious conflict with popular sentiment. It should be enough
for clergy and ministers, however, to know that in the strict eye of the
law those who have anything to do with bazaar raffles are rogues and
vagabonds, if this is necessary to supplement the consideration that
true religion must lose more than it gains by proceedings which have
frequently involved the first step taken by the young in the paths of
hazard, and led them into a career marred by misery if not crime. The
existing statutes do not give the Post Office authorities sufficient
powers for the detection and destruction of lottery matter; and the
protection of newspapers advertising lotteries by 8 & 9 Vict. c. 74,
making the fiat of the Attorney-General necessary for prosecutions, is
considerably abused.
_(e) Press Competitions and Coupon Gambling._—This is a most serious
branch of the evil, for which the press is very largely responsible.
Its grossest manifestation occurred some years ago in connection with
horse-racing and football playing. Unfortunately, some years prior to
this, in 1895, a judgment in _Stoddart_ v. _Sagar_, the scope of which
was mistaken by the public authorities, was held to rule the pernicious
system outside of both the Lottery Acts and of the Betting House Act
of 1853, and the question was neglected, with the consequence that the
system grew to such an extent that in the year 1900 it was brought
prominently before the council of the National Anti-Gambling League. Upon
investigation they found, amongst other flagrant instances, the case of
an obscure so-called sporting paper, the circulation of which had been
raised by means of these coupons to 100,000 a week. At the trial of the
proprietor, evidence was given on behalf of the General Post Office that
the letters with remittances were so numerous as to necessitate a special
delivery amounting to 20 sacks weekly. By evidence given by the London
and Westminster Bank it was shown that £63,680 was paid in to the account
of these valued customers in the first six months of 1900; and the prizes
paid away to successful gambling competitors had risen from over £10,000
in 1897 to over £27,000 in 1898; over £47,000 in 1899; and to September
only of 1900, to £46,000. It was not merely a penny or a shilling gamble,
as any number of penny lines could be filled in in the coupon, and any
number of coupons could be used by the same person, special directions
being published in the paper to save those competitors trouble who were
dealing in a large number, so that hundreds of pounds could be arranged
for in a few minutes, and cheques remitted. The receipts of this one
establishment in postal orders, etc., were shown to amount to £2000 to
£3000 a week. The prize for the Lincoln Handicap of 1900 was £3000. The
Courts unanimously decided that these coupon schemes came within the
scope of the Betting House Act of 1853. This was confirmed in later
cases in the King’s Bench Division and Appeal Court, and the judgments
incidentally comprised the most valuable decision, _that deposits to
betting-houses were none the less such if received indirectly, and not
at the premises_. One loophole was left. The 1853 Act may not apply to
betting-houses abroad. The proprietors moved their offices across the
Channel, continuing their advertisements in the low sporting papers,
and these were even admitted to otherwise respectable prints, tempted
presumably by the higher rates shown in Court to be paid for this class
of advertisement. An attempt was subsequently made in prosecuting _The
Sportsman_ to put a stop to this, but the King’s Bench Division held
that section 7 of the 1853 Act relating to advertising could not be
considered to cover these advertisements, although the judges expressed
their regret, and the Lord Chief Justice laid stress in his judgment upon
the necessity for legislation.
As matters stand there are two difficulties, viz. (1) betting-houses
abroad (they are generally kept by British bookmakers who have moved
across the Channel) are probably outside the scope of the 1853 Act,
although their business is done by attracting the custom of the British
public by advertisements in our newspapers and receiving bet deposits
through our Post Office; and (2) the advertisements in question are so
worded as to evade the precise terms of section 7 of the 1853 Act, so
that the conniving newspapers cannot be punished. The consequence is
that the nefarious business is carried on from offices abroad, and will
be until stopped by a new Act. Cheating by the proprietors was common
enough at the offices in the United Kingdom, but has greatly increased
now that they are more out of the reach of their dupes, and some of them
are being prosecuted by the police for fraud, for which extradition
can be obtained, at the present time. This, however, will not stop the
gullible public from sending their postal orders in myriads to other
establishments; and its not being a criminal offence to publish in
British newspapers, etc., advertisements of foreign betting-houses is one
of the defects of existing legislation.
In addition to the above, however, organs of our low-class press,
and other journals which might be expected to maintain some ethical
standard, have been competing with each other in offering so-called
prizes, frequently of high value, for all sorts of competitions, some
depending much upon chance, and others cleverly disguised; the latter,
unfortunately, penetrating to homes where the very thought of betting
would be a scandal. Much demoralisation has been caused by the system,
and the laws are inadequate to deal with many of its subterfuges.