activity capable of generating such elements of hazard is pressed into the service of gambling: sports and business occupations become popular in proportion as they can by their structure be made to minister to the craving for hazard; every sort of competition where a sufficient element of the incalculable exists is pervaded by gambling.
If the monotony of toil drives large numbers of workers to seek violent sensational relief in gambling, the ennui of idleness prompts the leisured classes to the same abuse. A totally or partially parasitic life (where little or no socially directed labour is imposed), though leaving a large margin of free energy, makes more for dilettantism than for art, and depriving play of its healthy interest as a relief from work induces a “boredom” which fosters gambling among other sensational extravagances. Moreover in the rich, leisured class the disproportion between earning and spending loosens the just sense of property more than in any other class, so that large miraculous transfers of property by betting seem less discrepant with the ordinary conditions of their life.
This line of diagnosis makes it quite apparent what are the real supports of gambling, and how the vice inheres in the wider “social problem,” only to be cured or abated in proportion as sounder general conditions of social order are obtained. When we regard the actual life of an ordinary worker in a factory town we can easily understand the attraction of “betting.” It is hard to refuse sympathy to the factory “hand” or clerk who occasionally puts his “shilling” on a horse, going through his weary day’s work with the zest of expectancy and hope afforded by his speculation. It gives him a topic of conversation in the intervals of his work, and is for him a sort of “politics” in leisure hours: into his dull life it introduces an element of romance.
It is, however, impossible to discuss the practical ethics of modern gambling without regarding that factor of pure gambling, which we have analysed, in its actual place as part of a vicious amalgam in a dissipated life.
We have chiefly considered the derationalising influence of the anarchic element of chance which is the nucleus of the process. But, regarded as a mode of transfer of property, gambling involves a union of several anti-social desires. The desire to take unearned gains is, as we have seen, itself immoral, for such gains of necessity imply an injury to some other known or unknown persons, nor in the case of gambling is the damage thus done to the character of a winner mitigated by the knowledge that those from whom he wins have sought similar unearned gains at his expense. In many natures the possibility of such facile gain quickens the latent instinct of avarice, one of the most insidiously disintegrating influences in human society, inviting as it does complete self-absorption and an entire loss of sympathy with the material interests of one’s fellows. The brooding infatuation of the habitual gambler chills human sympathy more certainly than any other practice, inducing not indeed enmity or active animosity so much as a callousness which views the misfortunes of others with placid indifference. It is just this absorption upon selfish ends in reference to incidents fraught with emotional strain that is prone at once to break down the whole fabric of the moral character and to dethrone the reason. For as man is only moral and rational as a being who stands in orderly relation to other similar beings in human society, so a practice based on a virtual denial of this social order is the arch-enemy of human personality: instead of a man we have a self-absorbed emotionalist. “In the making of a bet—a man resolves to repress the use of his reason, his will, his conscience, his affections; only one part of his nature is allowed free play, and that is his emotions.”[1]
The passion of gambling, once settled in a man, seems to take physical root in him and to be almost as difficult to expel as drink, opium, or any other acquired physical vice. In extreme cases, it is often held, gambling tends to absorb all other interests, even swallowing up its associate vices. This, however, is not the normal case. Gambling commonly consorts with drink: gambling-houses are commonly places for the sale of alcoholic liquors, and wherever the law permits, or can be evaded, drink-shops are betting haunts. Professional gamblers are doubtless sober when they ply their craft, for skill and cunning are requisite in most kinds of “mixed” gambling: a broker “cornering” the market, like a bookmaker handling a sudden shift in the odds, or a card-sharper with suspicious dupes, needs to have his wits about him. But it is not as gamblers but as tricksters that these men need to be sober, and as they require sobriety in themselves they desire the opposite in their dupes. Hence, the business of gambling is often done in an atmosphere of alcohol. This is not, indeed, invariably the case. The temperament of some people is so sanguine and so prone to reckless play that no physical stimulant seems necessary. But in Northern European peoples drink is usually necessary to induce that instability of judgment and disregard of the future which are conditions of gambling.
The statistics of crime prove beyond all cavil that gambling is the king’s highway to fraud and theft. This is not merely because it loosens general morality and in particular saps the rationale of property, but because cheating is inseparably associated with most actual modes of gambling. This does not imply that most persons who bet are actually cheats or thieves; but persons who continue to be cheated or robbed, half-conscious of the nature of the operations, are fitting themselves for the other and more profitable part if they are thrown in the way of acquiring a sufficient quantity of evil skill or opportunity. The “honour” of a confirmed gambler, even in high life, is known to be a very hollow commodity, and where there is less to lose in social esteem even this slender substitute for virtue is absent. What percentage of “men who bet” would refuse to utilise a secret tip of a “scratched” favourite or the contents of an illegally disclosed sporting telegram? The barrier between fraud and smartness does not exist for most of them.
Serious investigation of the gambling process discloses the fact that pure gambling does not afford any economic basis of livelihood, save in a few cases where, as at the roulette-table or in a lottery, those who gamble know and willingly accept the chances against them. And even in the case of the roulette-table the profits to the bank come largely from the advantage which a large fund possesses in play against a smaller fund: in the fluctuations of the game the smaller fund which plays against the bank is more likely at some point in the game to be absorbed so as to disable the player from continuing his play. If a man with £1000 were to play “pitch and toss” for sovereigns with a number of men, each of whom carried £10, he must, if they played long, win all their money. So, even where skill and fraud are absent, economic force is a large factor in success.
Since professional gambling in a stockbroker, a croupier, a bookmaker, or any other species, involves some use of superior knowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the “chances” amounts to “loading” the dice, the non-professional gambler necessarily finds himself a loser on any long series of events. These losses are found in fact to be a fruitful cause of crime, especially among men employed in businesses where sums of money belonging to the firm are passing through their hands. It is not difficult for a man who constantly has in his possession considerable funds which he has collected for his employer to persuade himself that a temporary use of these funds, which otherwise lie idle, to help him over a brief emergency, is not an act of real dishonesty. He is commonly right in his plea that he had no direct intention to defraud his employer. He expected to be able to replace the sum before its withdrawal was discovered. But since not only legally but morally a person must be presumed to “intend” that which is a natural or reasonable result of his action, an indirect intention to defraud must be ascribed to him. He is aware that he is acting wrongly, as well as illegally, in using the firm’s money for any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing the quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances extenuating his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it, must be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner or later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet his obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more readily for two reasons. First, there is a genuine probability (not so large, however, as he thinks) that he can replace the money before any “harm is done.” So long as he does replace it, no harm appears to him to have been done: the firm has lost nothing by his action. This narrower circumstance of extenuation is supported by
