BETTING LOSSES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4904, 18 November 1925, Page 3

BETTING LOSSES.

WASTE. OF NATIONAL MATERIAL. VIEWS OF SHR L. C. MONEY. “I do not believe that good work can be done by a man who hats risked on a race the price of feeding his family for a day or of paying his rent for a week. In every week that pass*es hundreds of thousands of families live in misery through the betting game, which' is a ‘mug’s game,’” writes Sir L. Chiozza Money in the Brotherhood World. then there is the waste of national material which is especially grievous at a time when the national economy has declined, and is threatened with irretrievable decline. The railway, like the Post Office, bow to the racecourse. I live on a racing line, and when the races are on decent work goes, by the board. ■On fhe last occasion there was no. train from my. station to London between 10.30 in the morning and 6.30 in the evening for a week, because special trains, at extravagant prices, were taking a mixture of swells and blackguards to a wellknown racecourse. So, to. make an important London call in the afternoon, I had to waste many And while racing trains are. organised on the grand scale, this same line refuses to adopt electrification — even while electrical firms lack orders and skilled engineers continue wisely to embark for America. “What the total losses' may be I do not know, but 1 believe that what between the waste of time/ material, and labour/it cannot be leiss ■‘han £100,000,000 a year. If monetary value were given shrjdluethe the mf value should be given to lives, the figures would' be even higher, than this. ■

“What is the remedy ? To my mind it is ouly to be found to making our educational methods less of a sham, and in providing full opportunities for the practice of real sport as distinguished from what njajsquerades under , that name in the bettitg columns,. Cricket is supposed to be a national game but not one man in a thousand knows hbiw to hold a . bat properly. So it is with other pastimes. Football is ■ for the greater part a gladiatorial contest played by professionals for crowds of mere spectators; 1 many of whom are gamblers in ‘competitionis.’ “We want our people to play games, not to look at them, o-r bet upon them. Let me not be misunderstood. I can see no harm in a bet between friends on the result of a contest of any kind in wihch both take a lively and real interest. What we h.ave to' attack is the organised, sordid, and largely dishonest -business which gives us not even good race {racks, but a collection of bookies (honest arid dishonest), touts and racecourse gangs, furnished with scientific and State machinery to pray upon the millions.”