possible to avoid thinking what a singularly high-souled set of gentry
we have got amongst. What ambitions! To trick money out of somebody's
pocket! To wager when you know that you have made winning certain! The
outcome of it all is that, in the unequal battle between the men who
back and the men who lay, the latter must win; they _will_ win, even if
they have to cog the dice on a pinch; and, moreover, they will not be
found out officially, even though their "secret" is as open as if it
were written across the sky. A strange, hard, pitiless crew are these
same bookmakers. Personally, strange to say, they are, in private life,
among the most kindly and generous of men; their wild life, with its
excitement and hurry, and keen encounters of wits, never seems to make
them anything but thoughtful and liberal when distress has to be aided;
but the man who will go far out of his way to perform a charitable
action will take your very skin from you if you engage him in that
enclosure which is his battle-ground, and he will not be very particular
as to whether he wins your skin by fair means or foul.
About two years ago, an exasperating, soft-headed boy brought a colossal
fortune into the Ring. I never pitied him much; I only longed to see him
placed in the hands of a good schoolmaster who knew how to use a birch.
This piteous wretch, with his fatuous airs of sharpness, was exactly the
kind of game that the bookmakers cared to fly at; he was cajoled and
stimulated; he was trapped at every turn; the vultures flapped round
him; and there was no strong, wise man to give the booby counsel or to
drag him by main force from his fate. There was no pity for the boy's
youth; he was a mark for every obscene bird of prey that haunts the
Turf; respectable betting men gave him fair play, though they exacted
their pound of flesh; the birds of Night gave him no fair play at all.
In a few short months he had poured a quarter of a million into the
bursting pockets of the Ring, and he was at last "posted" for the paltry
sum of £1,400. This tragic farce was not enacted in a corner; a hundred
journals printed every act as it was played; the victim never received
that one hearty flogging which might have saved him, and the curtain was
at last rung down on a smug, grinning group of bookmakers, a deservedly
ruined spendthrift, and a mob of indifferent lookers-on. So minutely
circumstantial were the newspapers, that we may say that all England saw
a gigantic robbery being committed, and no man, on the Turf or off,
interfered by so much as a sign. Decidedly, the Ethics of the Turf offer
an odd study for the moralist; and, in passing, I may say that the
national ethics are also a little queer. We ruin a tradesman who lets
two men play a game at billiards for sixpence on licensed premises, and
we allow a silly boy to be rooked of a quarter of a million in nine
months, although the robbery is as well-known as if it were advertised
over the whole front page of _The Times_ day by day.
In sum, then, we have an inner circle of bookmakers who take care either
to bet on figures alone, or on perfectly accurate and secret
information; we have another circle of sharp owners and backers, who, by
means of modified (or unmodified) false pretences, succeed at times in
beating the bookmakers; we have then an outer circle, composed partly of
stainless gentlemen who do not bet and who want no man's money, partly
of perfectly honest fellows who have no judgment, no real knowledge, and
no self-restraint, and who serve as prey on which the bookmakers batten.
And then we have circle on circle showing every shade of vice, baseness,
cupidity, and blank folly. First, I may glance--and only glance--at the
unredeemed, hopeless villains who are the immediate hangers-on of the
Turf. People hardly believe that there are thousands of sturdy,
able-bodied men scattered among our great towns and cities who have
never worked, and who never mean to work. In their hoggish way they feed
well and lie warm--the phrase is their own favourite--and they subsist
like odious reptiles, fed from mysterious sources. Go to any suburban
race meeting (I don't care which you pick) and you will fancy that
Hell's tatterdemalions have got holiday. Whatsoever things are vile,
whatsoever things are roguish, bestial, abominable, belong to the
racecourse loafers. To call them thieves is to flatter them, for their
impudent knavery transcends mere thieving; they have not a virtue; they
are more than dangerous, and, if ever there comes a great social
convulsion, they will let us know of their presence in an awkward
fashion, for they are trained to riot, fraud, bestiality, and theft, on
the fringe of the racecourse.
Then comes the next line of predatory animals who suck the blood of the
dupes. If you look at one of the daily sporting papers you will see, on
the most important page, a number of flaming announcements, which will
make very comic reading for you if you have any sense of humour at all.
Gentlemen, who usually take the names of well-known jockeys or trainers,
offer to make your fortune on the most ridiculously easy terms. You
forward a guinea or half-a-guinea, and an obliging prophet will show you
how to ruin the bookmakers. Old Tom Tompkins has a "glorious success"
every week; Joe, and Bill, and Harry, and a good score more, are always
ready to prove that they named the winner of any given race; one of
these fellows advertises under at least a dozen different names, and he
is able to live in great style and keep a couple of secretaries,
although he cannot write a letter or compose a circular. The _Sporting
Times_ will not allow one of these vermin to advertise in its columns,
and it has exposed all their dodges in the most conclusive and trenchant
set of articles that I ever saw; but other journals admit the
advertisements at prices which seem well-nigh prohibitive, and they are
content to draw from £15 to £20 per day by blazoning forth false
pretences. I have had much fun out of these "tipsters," for they are
deliciously impudent blackguards. A fellow will send you the names of
six horses--all losers; in two days he will advertise--"I beg to
congratulate all my patrons. This week I was in great form on the whole,
and on Thursday I sent all six winners. A thousand pounds will be paid
to any one who can disprove this statement." Considering that the sage
sent you six losers on the Thursday, you naturally feel a little
surprised at his tempestuously confident challenge. All the seers are
alike; they pick names at haphazard from the columns of the newspapers,
and then they pretend to be in possession of the darkest stable secrets.
If they are wrong, and they usually are, they advertise their own
infallibility all the more brazenly. I do not exactly know what getting
money under false pretences may be if the proceedings which I have
described do not come under that heading, and I wonder what the police
think of the business. They very soon catch a poor Rommany wench who
tells fortunes, and she goes to gaol for three months. But I suppose
that the Rommany rawnee does not contribute to the support of
influential newspapers. A sharp detective ought to secure clear cases
against at least a dozen of these parasites in a single fortnight, for
they are really stupid in essentials. One of the brotherhood always sets
forth his infallible prophecies from a dark little public-house bar near
Fountain Court. I have seen him, when I came off a journey, trying to
steady his hand at seven in the morning; his twisted, tortured fingers
could hardly hold the pencil, and he was fit for nothing but to sit in
the stinking dusk and soak whisky; but no doubt many of his dupes
imagined that he sat in a palatial office and received myriads of
messages from his ubiquitous corps of spies. He was a poor, diseased,
cunning rogue; I found him amusing, but I do not think that his patrons
always saw the fun of him.
And last there comes the broad outer circle, whereof the thought makes
me sad. On that circle are scattered the men who should be England's
backbone, but they are all suffering by reason of the evil germs wafted
from the centre of contagion. Mr. Matthew Arnold often gave me a good
deal of advice; I wish I could sometimes have given him a little. I
should have told him that all his dainty jeers about middle-class
denseness were beside the mark; all the complacent mockery concerning
the deceased wife's sister and the rest, was of no use. If you see a man
walking right into a deadly quicksand, you do not content yourself with
informing him that a bit of fluff has stuck to his coat. Mr. Arnold
should have gone among the lower middle-class a trifle more instead of
trusting to his superfine imagination, and then he might have got to
know whither our poor, stupid folks are tending. I have just ended an
unpleasantly long spell which I passed among various centres where
middle-class leisure is spent, and I would not care to repeat the
experience for any money. Any given town will suit a competent observer,
for I found scarcely any vital differences in passing from place to
place. It is tragical and disheartening to see scores of fine lads and
men, full of excellent faculties and latent goodness--and all under the
spell of the dreary Circe of the Turf. I have been for a year, on and
off, among a large circle of fellows whom I really liked; and what was
their staple talk? Nothing but betting. The paralysis at once of
intellect and of the sense of humour which attacks the man who begins
flirting with the gambling Enchantress struck me with a sense of
helplessness. I like to see a race when it is possible, and I can always
keep a kind of picture of a horse in my eye. Well, I have known a very
enthusiastic gentleman say, "The Bard, sir, The Bard; the big horse, the
mighty _bay_. He'll smother 'em all." I modestly said, "Do you think he
is big enough?" "Big enough! a giant, sir! Mark my words, sir, you'll
see Bob Peck's colours in triumph on the bay." I mildly said: "I thought
The Bard was a very little one when I saw him, and he didn't seem bay.
He was rather like the colour you might get by shaking a flour-dredger
over a mulberry. Have you had a look at him?" As usual, I found that my
learned friend had never seen that horse nor any other; he was
neglecting his business, loafing with wastrels, and trying, in a small
way, to imitate the fine strategy of the Colonel and the Captain and
Odysseus. Amongst these bewitched unfortunates, the life of the soul
seems to die away. Once I said to a nice lad, "Do none of your set ever
read anything?" and he made answer, "I don't think any of them read
very much except the _Sportsman_." That was true--very true and rather
shocking. The _Sportsman_ is bright enough and good enough in its way,
and I read it constantly; but to limit your literature to the
_Sportsman_ alone--well, it must be cramping. But that is what our fine
young men are mostly doing nowadays; the eager, intellectual life of
young Scotchmen and of the better sort of Englishmen is unknown: you may
wait for a year and you will never hear a word of talk which is
essentially above the intelligence of a hog; and a man of whom you are
fond, purely because of his kindliness, may bore you in the deadliest
manner by drawling on by the hour about names and weights, the shifting
of the odds, and the changes of luck. The country fairly swarms with
clubs where betting goes on all day, and sometimes all night: the
despicable dupes are drawn in one after another, and they fall into
manifold varieties of mischief; agonized parents pray for help;
employers chafe at the carelessness and pre-occupation of their
servants; the dupes sink to ruin unpitied, and still the crowd steps
onward to the gulf of doom. To think that by merely setting certain
noble creatures to exhibit their speed and staunchness, we should have
ended by establishing in our midst a veritable Inferno! Our faith, our
honour, our manhood, our future as a nation, are being sacrificed, and
all because Circe has read her spell over our best and most promising
souls. And our legislators amuse themselves with recriminations! We
foster a horde of bloodsuckers who rear their strength on our weakness
and our vices. Why should a drink-seller be kept in check by his having
to pay for a license, while the ruin-seller needs no license, and is
not even required to pay income tax. If licenses to bet were issued at
very heavy prices, and if a crushing fine were inflicted on any man who
made a book without holding a license, we might stamp out the villainous
small fry who work in corners at all events. But Authority is supreme;
the peer and the plutocrat go on unharmed, while the poor men who copy
follies which do not hurt the rich go right on to the death of the soul.
_April, 1889._
_DISCIPLINE_.
Of the ancestor generally assigned to us by gentlemen who must be
right--because they say so--we have very few records save the odd
scratches found on bones and stones, and the remnants of extremely
frugal meals eaten ages ago. We gather that the revered ancestor hunted
large game with an audacity which must have pleased the Rider Haggard of
ancient days; at any rate, some simple soul certainly scratched the
record of a famous mammoth-fight on a tusk, and we can now see a furious
beast charging upon a pigmy who awaits the onset with a coolness quite
superior to Mr. Quatermain's heroics. That Siberian hunter evidently
went out and tried to make a bag for his own hand, and I have no doubt
that he carried out the principle of individualism until his last
mammoth reduced him to pulp. There is no indication of organization,
and, although the men of the great deltas were able to indulge in
oysters with a freedom which almost makes me regret the advance of
civilization and the decay of Whitstable, yet I cannot trace one record
of an orderly supper-party. This shows how the heathen in his blindness
neglects his natural advantages. Long after the savage of the tundras
passed away we find vestiges of the family; and thenceforward discipline
advances steadily, though with occasional relapses toward anarchy, until
we see the ordered perfection which enables us to have West-end riots
and all-night sittings of the House of Commons without any trouble
whatever. I do not care much to deal with the times when the members of
the families elected each other promiscuously according to the success
with which they managed to club their neighbours--in fact, I wish to
come as soon as possible to the period when discipline, as understood by
us, was gradually allowed to sway the lives of men, and when the
sections of the race recognized tacitly the law of the strongest by
appointing their best man as chief. At present we in England are passing
through a dangerous and critical transition stage; a very strong party
inclines to abolish discipline of all sorts, the views of the
Continental anarchists are slowly filtering into our great towns, and,
as soon as such a move is safe, we shall have a large number of people
who will not scruple to cry out for free land, no taxation, free
everything. We have heard so much about rights lately that some of us
are beginning to question within ourselves as to what rights really are.
If a gentleman, no matter how bookish or eloquent he may be, desires to
do away with discipline altogether, I will give him credit for all the
tongue-power which he happens to possess; but I must ask leave to think
for myself in old-fashioned grooves just a little longer. After all, a
system which--for civilized countries--has been growing gradually for
more thousands of years than we dare compute cannot be entirely bad, no
matter what chance faults we may see. The generations that have flown
into the night may not have possessed complete wisdom, but they adapted
their social systems step by step to the needs of each new generation,
and it requires very little logic to tell that they would not be likely
always to cast out the good. The noisy orator who gets up and addresses
a London crowd at midnight, yelling "Down with everything!" can hardly
know what he means to destroy. We have come a long way since the man of
the swamps hunted the hairy elephant and burrowed in caves; that very
structure in which the anarchists have taken to meeting represents sixty
thousand years of slow progression from savagery towards seemliness and
refinement and wisdom; and therefore, bitterly as we may feel the
suffering of the poor orator, we say to him, "Wait a little, and talk to
us. I do not touch politics--I loathe place-hunters and talkers as much
as you do; but you are speaking about reversing the course of the ages,
and you cannot quite manage that. Let us forget the windy war of the
place-hunters, and speak reasonably and in a broad human way."
I do not by any means hold with those very robust literary characters
who want to see the principle of stern Drill carried into the most
minute branchings of our complex society. (By-the-way, these robust
gentry always put a capital "D" to the word "Drill," as though they
would have their precious principle enthroned as an object of reverence,
or even of worship.) And I am inclined to think that not a few of them
must have experienced a severe attack of wrath when they found Carlyle
suggesting that King Friedrich Wilhelm would have laid a stick across
the shoulders of literary men had he been able to have his own way. The
unfeeling old king used to go about thumping people in the streets with
a big cudgel; and Carlyle rather implies that the world would not have
been much the worse off if a stray literary man here and there could
have been bludgeoned. The king flogged apple-women who did not knit and
loafers who were unable to find work; and our historian apparently
fancies that the dignity of kingship would have been rather enhanced
than otherwise had his hero broken the head of a poet or essayist. This
is a clear case of a disciplinarian suffering from temporary
derangement. I really cannot quite stomach such heroic and sweeping
work. Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant by birth, raised himself until
he was deservedly regarded as the greatest man of his day, and he did
this by means of literature; yet he coolly sets an ignorant, cruel,
crowned drill-serjeant high above the men of the literary calling. It is
a little too much! Suppose that Carlyle had been flogged back to the
plough-tail by some potentate when he first went to the University;
should we not have heard a good deal of noise about the business sooner
or later? Again, we find Mr. Froude writing somewhat placidly when he
tells us about the men who were cut to pieces slowly in order that their
agony might be prolonged. The description of the dismemberment of
Ballard and the rest, as given in the "Curiosities of Literature," is
too gratuitously horrible to be read a second time; but Mr. Froude is
convinced that the whole affair was no more than a smart and salutary
lesson given to some obtrusive Papists, and he commends the measures
adopted by Elizabeth's ministers to secure proper discipline. Similarly
the wholesale massacre of the people in the English northern counties is
not at all condemned by the judicious Mr. Freeman. The Conqueror left a
desert where goodly homesteads and farms had flourished; but we are not
any the less to regard him as a great statesman. I grow angry for a
time with these bold writers, but I always end by smiling, for there is
something very feminine about such shrill expressions of admiration for
force. I like to figure to myself the troubles which would have ensued
had Carlyle lived under the sway of his precious Friedrich. It was all
very well to sit in a comfortable house in pleasant Chelsea, and enlarge
upon the beauties of drill and discipline; but, had the sage been cast
into one of the noisome old German prisons, and kept there till he was
dying, merely because the kingly disciplinarian objected to a phrase in
a pamphlet, we should have heard a very curious tune from our great
humourist. A man who groaned if his bed was ill-made or his bacon
ill-fried would not quite have seen the beauty of being disciplined in a
foul cellar among swarming vermin.
The methods of certain other rulers may no doubt appear very fine to our
robust scribblers, but I must always enter my own slight protest. Ivan
the Terrible was a really thorough-paced martinet who preserved
discipline by marvellously powerful methods. He did not mind killing a
few thousands of men at a time; and he was answerable for several
pyramids of skulls which remained long after his manly spirit had passed
away. He occasionally had prisoners flayed alive or impaled merely by
way of instituting a change; and I think that some graphic British
historian should at once give us a good life of this remarkable and
royal man. The massacre of the revolted peasants would afford a fine
opening to a stern rhetorician; he might lead off thus--"Dost thou think
that this king cared for noble sentiment? Thou poor creature who canst
not look on a man without turning green with feminine terror, this
writer begs to inform you and all creatures of your sort that law is law
and discipline is discipline, and the divine origin of both is
undeniable even in an age of advertised soap and interminable spouting.
Ivan had no parliamentary eloquence under his control, but he had cold
steel and whips and racks and wheels, and he employed them all with
vigour for the repression of undisciplined scoundrels. He butchered some
thousands of innocent men! Ah, my sentimental friend, an anarchic mob
cannot be ruled by sprinkling rose-water; the lash and the rope and the
stern steel are needed to bring them to order! When my Noble One, with a
glare in his lion eyes, watched the rebels being skinned alive, he was
performing a truly beneficent function and preparing the way for that
vast, noble, and expansive Russia which we see to-day. The poor
long-eared mortals who were being skinned did not quite perceive the
beneficence at the time. How should they, unhappy long-eared creatures
that they were? Oh, Dryasdust, does any long-eared mortal who is being
skinned by a true King--a Canning, Königlich, Able Man--does the
long-eared one amid his wriggles ever recognize the scope and
transcendent significance of Kingship? Answer me that, Dryasdust, or
shut your eloquent mouth and go home to dinner."