GAMBLING APOLOGY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1036, 27 April 1912, Page 4

GAMBLING APOLOGY.

(By Clarence Rook.)

Once more the campaign against gambling has begun, and as I pick up the morning paper there are records of the skirmishes. It records a raid in Chicago on certain private houses where they play poker and bridge. It records a gentleman whose clerk sat at the receipt of custom somewhere in Holland, and the gentleman was penalised for encouraging gambling. It records a constable who lound boys playing pitch and toss, and captured a halfpenny, which he conveyed a boy) to the police station. And a couple of hours later, having noted the odds, I went to the race meeting. Theie was the estimable policeman organising the crowd at the race meeting, and not a lady who planked her sovereign on the loser was arrested. And coming home in the evening I looked into my own soul—which is like that of others —and wondered whether gambling is a vice or a virtue. You will get no reply from the law of England, or irom the law of any other country. We hide policemen behind bales of cotton to catch little boys at play with halfpennies upon abandoned barges on a Sunday afternoon, and we give a Civil List pension to a doctor who stakes his hands against the Rontgeu Rays, while we applaud the aviator who will risk his life, and often lose it, against the Power of the Air. And the conclusion I am led to is that the most sacred thing in England is a halfpenny. It drops something of its sanctity as it moulds into sovereigns, and when it becomes a bit of paper that merely represents coinage,' it is just tolerated as a gambling medium. A nod and a wink to a blind horse on the Stock Exchange is a respectable way of making a living.

CONTRASTS IN GAMBLING. Being a gambler with lile, I have much sympathy with the boy who plays banco on a barge tor halfpennies, and the cabman who puis his hall-crown on his fancy. They work hard as a rule —with the monotony of so much a week, just as some other millions of human beings. Notniug unexpected will ever happen, unless something is ventured. But what shall be ventured —a halfpenny or a life ? The absurdity is that we line a boy for risking his hallpenny whilst nothing is done to the man who risks his furniture, his home, bis children, and even his life. My first prize at school taught me to gamble, tor it was Dr. Smiles’ “Self Help,” in which, if you please, the gamblers are held up to admiration by that apostle of work and success. Benvenuto Cellini you have doubtless read his account of the matter in his Autobiography pitched tables, clothes, copper, pewter, mud the whole contents of his kitchen into the hre that was to cast his statue of “Perseus, ” and the world commends him. Bernard Pallissy, in the same way, staked his household furniture —to the consternation of his wile for the baking of his glorious earthenware, VVe could have got along without the pots or the Perseus, but we commend those men who staked their furniture and their domestic comlort against the chance of a pot or an image.

The truth is that vve are all gamblers, from the millionaires’ wives who gamble iu private dwellings to the boy who gambles in halfpennies under the railway arch. We are all risking something on a chance of the future. Hoping ahead rather than resenting the past. The fun of life is the gamble of it. Personally, I am a gambler in moderation, i play bridge occasionally for tenpence a hundred, and find the triumph of the street boy when I have won enough to pay a taxicab home. But this is on private premises. Were I to play shovehalfpenny on licensed premises and win or lose twopence, the heavy hand of the law would be upon me.

I must not gamble. Must not i ? Here comes the serious question to the man who is encouraged to stake his life, his servants, his cnildren, his householu furniture against all the chance of the future. To gamble against all risks of disaster. lam here, toss a blank balance against chance of disaster, and the State encourages me in the gamble, lam encouraged to risk health and time and life ; we are all encouraged to risk these apparently unimportant things. But if a poor boy risks a halfpenny on the uirn of a card he is arrested. And I am not sure that the hailpenny is more important than the file that Captain Scott and his men are slaking on tne South Pole.

NEW TAPS OF REVENUE. We all bet ; we are all gamblers who are worth anything, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer should recognise the fact that there is uol a man in England worth his salt who is not gambling on the future with some sort of idea that the future will bring him something better than the past. I would not go so far as to suggest the Stale lottery, from which Hambury lakes toll of the natural human instinct to gamble, though it would be but the recognition of a universal habit. But if a Chancellor ol the Exchequer is looking for new taps of revenue, he might remember that tap-root of human nature which is the gambling instinct. You cannot dam it or block it, or in any way shut it down. But you can lake toll from it. For really it is not worse to toss for a penny than to stake your life on a delusion. The penny is not the must sacred thing in the world. Wherefore, why should not the ordinary small gambler be roped into the general contribution ? Why should his small, private vie# not be tinned into a public virtue ? As the small gambler, I am quite willing to pay my own percentage of the uncertain gains, and I would advise the Chancellor of the Exchequer to spread his takes and widen them and deepen them till he cornea down to the very root of human nature —which is the love of a gamble. Then he will tap the spirit, and spirits should be taxed. And reflecting that there is at present no tax on those thousands of slips which pass to and fro on the racecourse between gamblers, I conclude that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is missiug his chances —because he does not approve of gambling, and does not quite know what it means —and its possibilities. He should tax the gambler who is everywhere—though he never knows his income. However, as I conclude, I sit down to gamble in the small way, and I find that the gambler is already taxed. My ace of spades informs me that there is threepence duly on cards, —Oamaru Mail.