Part 14

This crime is getting its pry under many a mercantile house in our cities, and before long down will come the great establishment, crushing reputation, home, comfort, and immortal souls. How it diverts and sinks capital may be inferred from some authentic statements before us. The ten gaming-houses that once were authorized in Paris passed through the banks, yearly, three hundred and twenty-five millions of francs! The houses of this kind in Germany yield vast sums to the government. The Hamburg establishment pays to the government treasury forty thousand florins; and Baden Baden one hundred and twenty thousand florins. Each one of the banks in the large gaming-houses of Germany has forty or fifty croupiers standing in its service.

Where does all the money come from? The whole world is robbed! What is most sad, there are no consolations for the loss and suffering entailed by gaming. If men fail in lawful business, God pities, and society commiserates; but where in the Bible, or in society, is there any consolation for the gambler? From what tree of the forest oozes there a balm that can soothe the gamester's heart? In that bottle where God keeps the tears of his children, are there any tears of the gambler? Do the winds that come to kiss the faded cheek of sickness, and to cool the heated brow of the laborer, whisper hope and cheer to the emaciated victim of the game of hazard? When an honest man is in trouble, he has sympathy. "Poor fellow!" they say. But do gamblers come to weep at the agonies of the gambler? In Northumberland was one of the finest estates in England. Mr. Porter owned it, and in a year gambled it all away. Having lost the last acre of the estate, he came down from the saloon and got into his carriage; went back; put up his horses, and carriage, and town house, and played. He threw and lost. He started home, and on a side alley met a friend from whom he borrowed ten guineas; went back to the saloon, and before a great while had won twenty thousand pounds. He died at last a beggar in St. Giles. How many gamblers felt sorry for Mr. Porter? Who consoled him on the loss of his estate? What gambler subscribed to put a stone over the poor man's grave? Not one!

Furthermore, this sin is the source of uncounted dishonesties. The game of hazard itself is often a cheat. How many tricks and deceptions in the dealing of the cards! The opponent's hand is ofttimes found out by fraud. Cards are marked so that they may be designated from the back. Expert gamesters have their accomplices, and one wink may decide the game. The dice have been found loaded with platina, so that "doublets" come up every time. These dice are introduced by the gamblers unobserved by the honest men who have come into the play; and this accounts for the fact that ninety-nine out of a hundred who gamble, however wealthy they began, at the end are found to be poor, miserable, ragged wretches, that would not now be allowed to sit on the door-step of the house that they once owned.

In a gaming-house in San Francisco, a young man having just come from the mines deposited a large sum upon the ace, and won twenty-two thousand dollars. But the tide turns. Intense anxiety comes upon the countenances of all. Slowly the cards went forth. Every eye is fixed. Not a sound is heard, until the ace is revealed favorable to the bank. There are shouts of "Foul! Foul!" but the keepers of the table produce their pistols and the uproar is silenced, and the bank has won ninety-five thousand dollars. Do you call this a game of chance? There is no chance about it.

But these dishonesties in the carrying on of the game are nothing when compared with the frauds which are committed in order to get money to go on with the nefarious work. Gambling, with its greedy hand, has snatched away the widow's mite and the portion of the orphans; has sold the daughter's virtue to get means to continue the game; has written the counterfeit signature, emptied the banker's money vault, and wielded the assassin's dagger. There is no depth of meanness to which it will not stoop. There is no cruelty at which it is appalled. There is no warning of God that it will not dare. Merciless, unappeasable, fiercer and wilder it blinds, it hardens, it rends, it blasts, it crushes, it damns. It has peopled Moyamensing, and Auburn, and Sing Sing.

How many railroad agents, and cashiers, and trustees of funds, it has driven to disgrace, incarceration, and suicide! Witness a cashier of the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, who stole one hundred and three thousand dollars to carry on his gaming practices. Witness the forty thousand dollars stolen from a Brooklyn bank; and the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars taken from a Wall Street Insurance Company for the same purpose! These are only illustrations on a large scale of the robberies every day committed for the purpose of carrying out the designs of gamblers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars every year leak out without observation from the merchant's till into the gambling hell.

A man in London keeping one of these gambling houses boasted that he had ruined a nobleman a day; but if all the saloons of this land were to speak out, they might utter a more infamous boast, for they have destroyed a thousand noblemen a year.

Notice also the effect of this crime upon domestic happiness. It hath sent its ruthless ploughshare through hundreds of families, until the wife sat in rags, and the daughters were disgraced, and the sons grew up to the same infamous practices, or took a short cut to destruction across the murderer's scaffold. Home has lost all charms for the gambler. How tame are the children's caresses and a wife's devotion to the gambler! How drearily the fire burns on the domestic hearth! There must be louder laughter, and something to win and something to lose; an excitement to drive the heart faster and fillip the blood and fire the imagination. No home, however bright, can keep back the gamester. The sweet call of love bounds back from his iron soul, and all endearments are consumed in the flame of his passion. The family Bible will go after all other treasures are lost, and if his everlasting crown in heaven were put into his hand he would cry: "Here goes, one more game, my boys! On this one throw I stake my crown of heaven."

A young man in London, on coming of age, received a fortune of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and through gambling in three years was thrown on his mother for support.

An only son went to New Orleans. He was rich, intellectual, and elegant in manners. His parents gave him, on his departure from home, their last blessing. The sharpers got hold of him. They flattered him. They lured him to the gaming-table and let him win almost every time for a good while, and patted him on the back and said, "First-rate player." But, fully in their grasp, they fleeced him; and his thirty thousand dollars were lost. Last of all he put up his watch and lost that. Then he began to think of home and of his old father and mother, and wrote thus:--

"MY BELOVED PARENTS:--You will doubtless feel a momentary joy at the reception of this letter from the child of your bosom, on whom you have lavished all the favors of your declining years. But should a feeling of joy for a moment spring up in your hearts when you shall have received this from, me, cherish it not. I have fallen deep--never to rise. Those gray hairs that I should have honored and protected I shall bring down with sorrow to the grave. I will not curse my destroyer, but oh! may God avenge the wrongs and impositions practised upon the unwary in a way that shall best please Him. This, my dear parents, is the last letter you will ever receive from me. I humbly pray your forgiveness. It is my dying prayer. Long before you shall have received this letter from me the cold grave will have closed upon me forever. Life is to me insupportable. I cannot, nay, I will not suffer the shame of having ruined you. Forget and forgive is the dying prayer of your unfortunate son."

The old father came to the post-office, got the letter, and fell to the floor. They thought he was dead at first; but they brushed back the white hair from his brow and fanned him. He had only fainted. I wish he had been dead; for what is life worth to a father after his son is destroyed?

When things go wrong at a gaming-table, they shout "Foul! foul!" Over all the gaming-tables of the world I cry out "Foul! foul! Infinitely foul!"

In modern days, in addition to the other forms of gambling, have come up the thoroughly organized and, in some States, legalized institution of lotteries. There are hundreds of citizens on the way to ruin through the lottery system. Some of the finest establishments in town are by this process being demolished, and the whole land feels the exhaustion of this accumulating evil. The wheel of Fortune is the Juggernaut that is crushing out the life of this nation. The records of the Insolvent Court of one city show that, in five years, two hundred thousand dollars were lost by dealing in lottery tickets. All the officers of the celebrated Bank of the United States who failed were found to have expended the money embezzled for lottery tickets.

A man drew in a lottery fifty thousand dollars, sold his ticket for forty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and yet did not have enough to pay the charges against him for lottery tickets. He owed the brokers forty-five thousand dollars.

An editor writes--"A man who, a few years ago, was blest with about twenty thousand dollars (lottery money), yesterday applied to us for ninepence to pay for a night's lodging."

A highly respectable gentleman drew twenty thousand dollars in a lottery; bought more tickets, and drew again; bought more--drew more largely; then rushed down headlong until he was pronounced by the select men of the village a vagabond, and his children were picked up from the street half starved and almost naked.

A hard-working machinist draws a thousand dollars; thenceforth he is disgusted with work, opens a rum grocery, is utterly debauched, and people go in his store to find him dead, close beside his rum-cask.

It would take a pen plucked from the wing of the destroying angel and dipped in blood to describe this lottery business.

A man committed suicide in New York, and upon his person was found a card of address giving a grog-shop as his boarding house, three blank lottery tickets, and a leaf from Seneca's Morals, containing an apology for self-murder.

One lottery in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held unlucky numbers.

There are men now, with lottery tickets in their pocket, which, if they have not sense enough to tear up or throw into the fire, will be their admission ticket at the door of the damned. As the brazen gates swing open they will show their tickets, and pass in and pass down. As the wheel of eternal Fortune turns slowly round, they will find that the doom of those who have despised God and imperilled their souls will be their awful prize.

God forbid that you, my reader, should ever take to yourself the lamentation of the Boston clerk, who, in eight months, had embezzled eighteen thousand dollars from his employer and expended it all in lottery tickets. "I have for the last seven months gone fast down the broad road. There was a time, and that but a few months since, when I was happy, because I was free from debt and care. The moment of the first steps in my downfall was about the middle of last June, when I took a share in a company, bought lottery tickets whereby I was successful in obtaining a share of one-half of the capital prize, since which I have gone for myself. I have lived and dragged out a miserable existence for two or three months past. Oh, that the seven or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker, to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence. Relatives and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such circumstances, but necessity compels. Oh, wretch! lottery tickets have been thy ruin. But I cannot add more."

There are multitudes of people who disapprove of ordinary lotteries, yet have been thoroughly deceived by iniquity under a more attractive nomenclature. The lottery in which our most highly respectable and Christian people invest is some "Art Association," or some benevolent "Gift Enterprise," in which they fondly believe there can be no harm in drawing Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley, or Cropsey's American Autumn!

At no time have lottery tickets been sown so broadcast as to-day, notwithstanding the law forbids the old-style lottery.

A few years ago our newspapers flamed with the advertisements of the Crosby Opera House scheme. A citizen of Chicago, finding on his hands an unprofitable building, calls upon the whole country to help him out. Rooms are opened in all the great cities. In rush, not the abandoned and the reprobate (for they like the old styles of swindling better), but the educated and refined and polished, until a host of people are in imminent peril of having thrown upon their hands a splendid Opera House. Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars worth of tickets. The portentous day approaches. The rail trains from many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and Christian manner. The throng presses in. Hold fast your tickets, all you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the wheel begins to move. The long agony is over. Hundreds of thousands of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden affluence. Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up to the house of him who owns the successful ticket. The lightnings tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Multitudes think that there has been foul play, and that, after all, they themselves, if the truth were known, did draw the Opera House. Ten years from now there will stand on the scaffold, or behind the prison door, or in the lonely room in which the suicide writes his farewell to wife or parents, men who will say that the first misstep of their life that put them on the wrong road was the ticket they bought in the Crosby Opera House.

The man who won that prize is already dead of his dissipations, and, strange to say, the beautiful building thus raffled away was found to be owned by its original possessor when all the excitement in regard to the matter had died away.

I care not on what street the office was, nor who were the abettors of the undertaking, nor who bought the tickets. I pronounce the whole scheme to have been a swindle, a crime, and an insult to God and the nation.