BETTING AND THE BOOKIE

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 7 April 1921, Page 3

BETTING AND THE BOOKIE

Peter the Pious writes in the Hokianga Times : — The Chief Justice of the Dominion has seen fit to make a statement from the bench to the effect that gambling vide bookmaking is the downfall of the youth of New Zealand. The Chief Justice is a gentleman who started life as a schoolmaster and freethinker, who has exceptionable academic abilities and other abilities, and quickly saw the advantage of the law and politics to school teaching. He also saw (Oh, the wisdom of the worldly wise) the fallacy of freethought (a beggarly body in Dunedin in the early days.) Blossoming into the wider arena of politics Robert Stout stood as the possible, and at one time the only possible opponent, of the late Richard Seddon. Inter] ectually the men were as far apart as the poles. Seddon had personality. Seddon remained Premier of the country and Stout became Chief Justice. Seddon is dead but his work remains, and may be criticised as his critics will. Stout lives, and from his high position he gives judgment, so just and so apparently profound that justices throw them to the wind. Juries recognise, they know, they feel, the weaknesses of human nature, and they know that a man of Robert Stout's nature —judicial, austere, just, austerely just —is quite incapable of being a good judge. A man of unimpeached character, an exceptionally learned man, an abstemious man, a just and lenient judge. Sir Robert Stout is not sufficiently a man of the I people to judge the popular weaknesses of the people. Thus we come back to his strictures on bookmakers. The bookmaker is a means —a bad means perhaps— to an outlet for the colonial's national amusement —i.e. gambiin.g That it is a bad form of amusement is beside the question. England does not wager war with Spain because the brutal game of bull fighting is their national sport. Horse racing is our national sport —that is, it is the sport that attracts the biggest crowds and the biggest money. Were it not for legalised gambling—the totalisator (quite as much misnamed as the French Parimuteul) our national sport would become as dead as Queen I Ann, a certain Roman's billy goat and professional cycling. Of the two medium* of gambling on the national sport (Sir Robert has too judicial a mind to consider the evils of the legalised form of gambling —totalisator, stock exchange, land deals and what not) the average punter (gentleman so erudite as Sir Robert Stout will doubtless know that this term has somewhat widened from its original meaning—if I some minds would only widen in I proportion !) prefers the bookmaker. The law however, says he shall only bet by means of the I totalisator. The law is very considerably broken and the bookmaker flourishes and grows rich. !He can only do so because a certain section of the community I prefers to do business with him to doing it with the machine. If we admit then that the gambling is bad. which it undoubtedly is, must be bad in all its forms, legal or otherwise, why then shonld Sir Robert pick out one medium of gambling, a small one only, as j the means of the downfall of the ! youth of the Dominion ? Are not the totalisator and the stock exchange equally guilty ?