Betting & Gambling: A National Evil. Various
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to the body of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category. In a word, secret gambling with other people’s money, on the general line of “heads I win, tails you lose,” is so largely prevalent in modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial atmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either not illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor delinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employees are more easily detected and punished.
But, living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other people’s money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a part in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an employee, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation, falls into lax ways of regarding other people’s money, and comes in an hour of emergency to “borrow” the firm’s money. This does not excuse his crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history.
Publicity and education are, of course, the chief instruments for converting illegitimate into legitimate speculation, for changing commercial gambling into commercial foresight. This intelligent movement towards a restoration of discernible order and rationality in business processes, by eliminating “chances” and placing the transfer of property and the earning of industrial gains on a more rational foundation, must, of course, go pari passu with other movements of social and industrial reforms which aim simultaneously at the education of individual personality and the reformation of the economic environment. Every step which places the attainment of property upon a sane rational basis, associating it with proportionate personal productive effort, every step which enables men and women to find orderly interests in work and leisure by gaining opportunities to express themselves in art or play under conditions which stimulate new human wants and supply means of satisfying them, will make for the destruction of gambling.
THE EXTENT OF GAMBLING
By John Hawke
Growth of Betting
The most disquieting feature in the consideration of the state of the country with regard to this habit is its spread among the wage-earning classes. By them it was little practised when it first became systematic in connection with horse-racing among people of better means. Groups of the latter class lost money and fortunes long before the fashion took any general hold of very considerable numbers of the aristocratic and wealthy classes. Betting took place principally at the race meetings. There were grand-stands upon some of the race-courses many years before the close of the eighteenth century, probably the largest being the one at Doncaster, erected in 1779 at a cost of £7000. It was not until ten years later that a regular market for credit betting was established by the institution of Tattersall’s Subscription Rooms; and, that the original purpose of the grand-stand was only for viewing the races, is made clear by the contemporary records. At Ascot Heath, a separate wooden shed had to be used by those who wished to bet. Even as late as 1833, although the Epsom stand was the largest in Europe, the betting market was kept away elsewhere, upon the hill. Six years later, complaints having been made of the betting market being held in the grand-stand at Doncaster, to the annoyance of the spectators, especially ladies, arrangements were decided upon for the future to form an enclosure for betting outside the stand. Similar precautions had previously been taken at Goodwood. Betting was transacted at Newmarket at betting posts, where rings were formed on the heath. Betting was also carried on away from the courses at premises belonging to Tattersall’s in London (which, however, in 1839 consisted merely of a small apartment, with only 300 members on the books), and in the vicinity of the course at the Newmarket Subscription Rooms, where there were only 57 members, other than those belonging to the Jockey Club. There were also special rooms hired at Doncaster, York, and Liverpool for members of either of the above clubs to bet in. A chronicle informs us, in the reign of William the Fourth, that although the number of spectators at Newmarket seldom exceeded 500, mostly of the highest classes, the majority on horseback, the turf was becoming more popular in 1836 and the attendances larger.
It will thus be understood that the general public, for a long time entirely excluded from the privileged betting circle, could only take part in the business by the connivance of some of the professional men having the entrée. In 1849, however, the Newmarket authorities, seeing the feasibility of largely adding to their funds, arranged that a small subscription should confer temporary membership of the Newmarket Rooms. This caused many complaints by the old habitués, and it was found necessary, in view of the dubious standing of some of the new-comers, to modify the credit system, and to insist upon daily settlements. The cash gaming of the race-course indulged in by the great bulk of race-goers was not betting, but was carried on by means of roulette-tables, lotteries, sweepstakes, and other adjuncts of the gambling-booth. The Select Committee of the House of Commons (1844), in reporting against the miscellaneous race-course gambling, clearly did not anticipate that the grand-stands and enclosures would take the place of these other methods, and become sources of great profit as places used for gambling by betting, and that the abolition of booths would merely result in the transfer of the gamblers to the enclosures or rings, as may be seen by the following paragraph from their report:—
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