as a deliberate reversion to those passions and that mental attitude which characterise the savage or pre-human man in his conduct and his outlook. There lurk in “civilised” man the remnants of survivals of countless ages of pre-human and of savage heredity, anarchic passions associated with barbarous superstitions. The order of civilisation claims to have killed or atrophied the grosser forms of these atavistic tendencies, but many of them are not dead; social control and education of individual habits keeps them in subordination or acquiescence, but on temptation they are ready to awake. Just as war and certain forms of sport can call from the caverns of heredity brutish traits whose presence was utterly unknown to their possessors, so the interest of gambling discovers in many natures a similarly fatal inheritance.
Maeterlinck has recently sought to find a quasi-rational basis for “luck” in the occasional revival of certain primitive instincts of self-protection which, seldom needed in the higher progress of humanity, have died down and rarely assert themselves. Whether such latent powers of extra-rational warning exist or ever did exist, we need not here discuss; it is, however, quite evident that the widespread belief in “luck” among gamblers is a reversion to a form of unreason which carries no sound instinct of direction with it. It is fair to adduce this belief in luck as an important testimony to the derationalising influences of gambling.
It does not seem true that the gambling habit pervades only or chiefly the least intelligent types of men. Among habitual gamblers on the stock exchange, on the turf and in the card-room, and wherever skill tempers chance, high degrees of cunning, memory, and judgment are often found, while certain qualities of determination and of self-command are conducive to success. But while many men possessing these qualities are drawn to games or business pursuits where a strong element of chance is present, there is no real affinity between any of these personal powers and pure gambling. It is not, for instance, true that skill, judgment, or self-command is of the least assistance at the roulette-table or at rouge-et-noir. The fact that these qualities are so commonly regarded as serviceable to the player may be cited as a conspicuous evidence of the derationalising influence of gambling even in the case of those who do not gamble. For in reality they are only useful in proportion as the game is not pure gambling.
The curious cunning expended in devising “systems” and the attention to multifarious incidents of “luck” indicate a genuine inhibition of the reasoning faculty. Both modes of manipulating chance are vitiated by the same two fallacies. Belief in the efficacy of a “system” implies that a series of consecutive coups is a causally connected chain, whereas, in fact, the result of each coup is entirely unaffected by the coup which preceded or follows it. The “system” gambler also believes that he is able to forecast to some extent the drift or current of chances which makes this causal connection. Similarly with the cruder superstitions, such as the notion that a virgin player will win his opening bout of play, or that turning one’s chair or changing one’s seat will break a spell of bad luck: they also imply that a sequence of separately determined events is in some unintelligible way a mutually determined group, and that a tendency running through the series can be altered by a casual or purposed action which is interjected from outside. The amazing hold which these superstitious notions obtain over persons of education and intelligence is a striking testimony to the intellectual havoc wrought by gambling. How insidious is the illusion about runs of luck may be shown by the ease with which the minds of most persons, who are averse to gambling and would deride the notion of a “system,” fall into the snare when it is set in the following form: Enter a room where rouge-et-noir is going on and learn that red has turned up twenty times in succession, when the next card is in the act of being drawn there is an almost irresistible tendency to expect black, from a first impulsive judgment which has false reference to the general improbability of red turning up twenty-one times running. Most persons, including trained scientists to whom I have put the case, requiring an immediate reply, have admitted that they would be disposed to bet against red.
A practice so corrupting to the intelligence not only of the habitué but even of the casual spectator stands condemned as a formidable enemy of education and of intellectual order.
In thus exposing the irrationality of gambling, both as a mode of transferring property and as a mental occupation, I have implicitly exposed its immorality also. Its repudiation of equitable order involves at once an intellectual and a moral descent to a lower plane of thought and feeling. Perhaps no other human interest, not based on purely physical craving, arouses so absorbing a passion: alcoholism itself scarcely asserts a stronger dominion over its devotees.
So widespread has been the zest for gambling among whole races as widely different in character and environment as the British, the Zulu, the Chinese, that we are almost driven to seek some physiological root for the passion. To give an added weight of interest to chance by attaching to it a transfer of property seems to imply a love of hazard as a permanent feature in humanity. Though the transfer of property by gambling not merely feeds the passion but imports grave moral injuries of its own, it cannot be said to originate gambling or to be essential to the play of the interest in chance or hazard. The folly and the social injury of gambling grow with the proportion of the stakes; but high stakes, while they concentrate and dramatise the play, do not create the interest.
Educationalists and other reformers who would exorcise the gambling habit must look deeper for its origin and early sustenance. The fevered excitement of the gambler is part of an exaggerated reaction against certain excesses of orderly routine imposed upon the life in which he lives. The dull, prolonged monotony of uninteresting drudgery which constitutes the normal workaday life of large masses of people drives them to sensational reactions which are crude and violent. The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. Their work affords no considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression, and the interest, achievement, and surprise which are ordinary human qualities. It is easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however well-ordered) human life would be vacant of interest and intolerable: in other words, it is a prime condition of humanity that the unexpected in the form of happening and achievement should be adequately represented in every life. Art in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, and play, as interested but unproductive effort, are essential. But where either the physical or mental exhaustion of industry, or other external conditions, prevent the due cultivation or the expression of wholesome art or play instincts, baser attractions usurp their place. It is impossible, and it would be undesirable, to deny to man the satisfaction of his instinctive zest in the unexpected, the hazardous, the disorderly: he needs not only achievement but accident to sustain his interest in life. The latter factor may yield largely to the former in highly civilised man, in a society where varied modes of art offer varied stimuli to self-expression and achievement: the artist who is a true artist is least likely to be a gambler. But a margin of disorder, or hazard and unreason, will always remain a factor in the interest of life: hence an element of unordered play as distinct from art will always survive.
Even a moral order imposed in the public interest, if too uniform and rigorous, will arouse, not merely in bad but in good natures, reactions towards lawlessness. There is much truth in what Charles Lamb wrote of his interest in the Seventeenth Century Comedy:—
I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses where the hunter cannot follow me—I am back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it.
So it is with all sorts and conditions of men: the incalculable, the lawless remains an ineradicable factor in life.
Where there is little or no provision of or stimulus to art, the crudest and most sensational play tends to absorb the entire margin of energy left after work is done.
In
