STOPPING GAMES OF CHANCE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 918, 16 February 1881, Page 3

STOPPING GAMES OF CHANCE.

In an article on the recent action of the police in stopping games of chance, the Press says: —“If the holidaymaking public like the fun of staking a shilling oil the extremely remote chance of winning a pound, and seeing a monkey draw a ticket for them, why should they be debarred from it ? Why should any of the ancient pastimes of the people on such occasions, games of chance or not, be disallowed so long as they are decently conducted, and so long as the public have no complaint against them? One bookmaker will do a hundred times more to encourage gambling than all the tables with monkeys to draw tickets; yet bookmaking is not legally a game of chance, and is, therefore, allowed to flourish unmolested, to the ruin of thousands, while the poor men with their monkeys are inexorably expelled to the great chagrin, probably of the public. In such cases ought not the prohibitory laws to be held in hand by the authorities as a means of checking any abuse of liberty should it arise, more than as a means of suppressing liberty itself? We cannot help thinking so, and although we have the highest respect for the law and the utmost love of order, we are sorry to sec this tendency to worry the people by a puritanical application of laws that were never intended to be applied puritanically.”