The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891. Various
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p>The Arena / Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
A PARADISE OF GAMBLERS
Many religious journals throughout the country have poured eulogies upon the pious head of our Postmaster General because of his raid against all letters bearing the least uncanny relation to that abhorred criminal body, the Louisiana Lottery. In one sense this action is not ill-advised; the national laws against gambling are distinct, and even if they were unjust their existence would be no excuse for their infringement. The highly moral action of Mr. Wanamaker, however, happening as it does at a time when his own relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion. As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which of late it has become the fashion to revile, devises its chief gains in a much less faulty manner. For such disbursements as one dollar, two dollars, five dollars, a good deal of golden expectancy and anticipation can be enjoyed, and there is no confirmed proof whatever that the citizens who are rash enough to expend these massive amounts have ever been swindled at the monthly New Orleans drawings. Indeed, they have ample proof, if they care to sift it, that somebody in Maine, or Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally, unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings—really more dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one, “Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don’t choose drink only as much as you want in me, and if you don’t choose to enter me at all, avoid me forever and a day”—then the iniquity of the whole organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The “prohibition extremists” are like lawyers who can never make their case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal, and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it sprang.
He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To realize in its full glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after he has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty broker—perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it requires a number of croupiers instead of one. He will see that these croupiers are in most cases men whose names posterity will hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists, and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy, afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a proxy in his soiled and desperate hand—an instrument almost as illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners’ native slums.1
The neophyte in speculators’ creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of “the street.” He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives, and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of “Black Friday,” an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides, resulted from this infamous “corner” wrought by a league of miserly zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon harden his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well soil the glory of Lexington or Bunker Hill by brooding over the pangs of those who were its victims. All great victories necessitate bloodshed. It is not every man who can wrest vast wealth from the turmoils of a “Black Friday.” … And so, after turning the pages of a revolting chronicle, all of which teem with calamity to the many and plethoric gain to the bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The “margin,” beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful buyer. “Pools,” open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. “Points” are given by one operator to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much and fears it too little. Its hideous vulgarity has ceased to shock him. Its “bulls,” with their often audacious purchases of stock for which they do not pay but out of whose random fluctuations in value they expect to reap thousands from the “bears,” who sell in a like blind, betting-ring fashion; its devices of “spreads,” and of “straddles,” which are combinations of “puts” and “calls” whereby the purchaser limits his loss and at the same time suits the chances of his winning to those of vacillant prices themselves; its unblushing compromises on the part of debtors with creditors, fifty cents on the dollar being frequently paid by bankrupts to the extent of one, two, or three hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism, have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their drastic and sinister spells. When he “starts out for himself,” as he is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate success is enormously doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought, as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great success with him, if he achieves it, will be—what? An almost Titanic power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up $12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest stock-exchange dealing—money notoriously not his own. He may desire to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted
It is a fact that the late James Fisk, Jr., was appointed by Judge Barnard, of New York, receiver of a railway (the Albany and Susquehanna) which lay a hundred miles outside of that magistrate’s judicial district.