The Waipukurau Press. Friday, January 12, 1906. THE RESPECTED GAMBLER.

Waipukurau Press, Issue 6, 12 January 1906, Page 2

The Waipukurau Press. Friday, January 12, 1906. THE RESPECTED GAMBLER.

—o—- — cheerful cable the other day casually mentioned that Mr Lawson, the “frenzied financer,” had just dropped £680,000 in a copper gamble. It also remarked that Lawson had declared his intention of continuing the game as long as he had a shilling left to play with. That is to say, he takes the advice of the only bookmaker to the green punter, and means to “ look for his money in the hole where he lost it.” Yet nobody rises to preach a sermon on the impropriety of it, and Lawson appears to lose no caste in the social or commercial world. All of which affords further proof that there is more in a name than people are asked to believe. For although a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, a vulgar' gambler when called “ an operator on ’Change” does not emit an effluvium nearly so offensive to the nostril of respectability. When the “ Jubilee Juggins” played up his few hundred thousands on the turf, he became, after losing it of course, au object of public derision. He pointed the moral of hundreds of homilies on the criminal folly of betting, and utterly ruined himself in the eyes of financial men. Bankers turned the back of confidence upon him, for who would advance money to a man that wanted it to stake on the contingency of one horse being able to gallop faster than another ? See what there was in a name there. If he, like Lawson, had bet with the Wall-street bookmakers that copper would go down by a certain date, and lost over half a million, the banker would trust him with increased respect, ann find him the money to “go for a recovery” by doubling the stakes. The game, however, is not as fair as horseracing, or two-up, while its effects upon the community are much more injurious. Because in the

bull and bear game each player will use every dodge that he knows of one to force the price of the people’s necessities up as high as he can, the other to artifically depress it, heedless of the ruin caused to men engaged in their production.