CHINESE AND COLONIALS. They are Brother Gamblers.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 269, 26 August 1905, Page 6

CHINESE AND COLONIALS. They are Brother Gamblers.

AH Win (what a name for "a pak-a-pu lottery gentleman !} was fined £5 by Dr. McArthur the other day, for running a gaming place whereat the white youth of Wellington "marked a ticket." The Chinaman was fined r but the whi^te folk were not. The white folk will shift to the next shop,. and go on marking tickets. The magistrate and the police evidently don't mind any more than we do the Chinese having a little gamble "on their own," for, although it isvery wrong indeed to gamble, the white man manages to be as speculatively wicked as his yellow friend. • • * You remember the two-up school raid, don't you, and that quite a lot of the two-uppers were fined? If about sixty youths, whose mothers and fathers don't know anything about their Chinese proclivities, were wheeled up before the magistrate, there would be very little "marking of tickets" by white people for some time. It is no secret that scores of young fellows in Wellington habitually enter into opium-reeking Chinese dens and gamble with the Chinamen. • * ♦ It is bad for the morals and the health and the pockets of these young fellows, and the only possible way to put a stop to the evil is to make the gamblers equally liable with the owner of the den. Wellington would get a considerable shock if it saw a list of fan-tan and pak-a-pu gamblers published in the papers as defendants " in a Chinese gambling case. It would shame them to be joined with Chinese coolies, and it would be bare justice to the coolies, who are aided and abetted in their law-breaking by people who ought to be thoroughly ashamed to be seen near a Chines© "hell." • • • We don't blame the Chinese m the least. Firstly, we blame the authorities for allowing Chinese to come into New Zealand, and secoaidly we blame the white gamblers who consort with Chinese out of pure greed. The Chinaman is out after every sixpence he can get. He is coming here m larger quantities, every month, and he isn't a fit companion for the white man, and his particular sins debase' those who participate in them. Finally, we have sins enough of our own to keep us fully employed, and any Asiatic addition to them distinctly minimises the value of the statement of a certain public man last Monday that "the young New Zealander is upright, cleanly, and moral, and, on the whole, God-fearing." It is something to live up to, and spending whole nights in Chinese dens won't help.