Chapter IV (1)

ARRAIGNMENT OF GAMBLING IN ITS MORAL ASPECTS.

“Did you ever see the autograph of the President?” said Warden B., of the I. State Penitentiary. He had been a member of my congregation for years, and at his request I had visited the prison to preach to the convicts. The wagon which brought me from the station carried the mail bag, and, while looking over his letters, he held up a large official envelope with the above question.

“No,” I answered, taking my eyes from the intelligent convict who sat in striped clothing writing at a desk, and whose shaven and shame-flushed face was persistently turned from me. “I would like to see his signature, as my vote helped to put him in the White House.”

“There it is,” said the warden, handing me the document, which I soon discovered to be a pardon for a certain youth, who had served three years of a six years sentence for theft from the Post Office Department.

“Why is this pardon given, warden?” “Well,” said he, “this young man is of good family, and has dependent on him a widowed mother, a wife and child. He became the dupe of gamblers who fleeced him, and then the Devil, I reckon, suggested that he might recoup his loss by stealing from the Government, and in an evil hour he fell, was detected, convicted, and with other United States men sent here. I remember the day he came; how heart-broken he stood in the corridor till the sheriff gave me the papers, unloosed his shackles, and turned the gang over to me. They were coupled in irons on the cars, and John was paired with a hardened felon who had done time before, as had most of the lot. They glanced defiantly around at the officers with a braggart insolence as the iron gates clanged on them, but he paled and trembled, tears silently flowing down his face to the stone floor. I followed to the bath-house, where they are washed, shaved, cropped and dressed in stripes. At the registry, when asked his age, name, etc., with great effort he managed to answer, but when asked his father’s name, a vision of the dead seemed to rise before him. Overwhelmed with shame he tried thrice with choking utterance to tell the name, and then faltered it with such a moan of agony that even the clerk, used to such scenes, felt his hand tremble as he wrote it down. You know our rules require the reading of all letters before they reach the prisoners. The chaplain, at my request, read those sent to him. We found such woe, such evidence of his former honor, such testimony to his previous good character, that friends became interested in him. I helped them, thinking it a case for Executive clemency. The President, who is a merciful man, looked into the case, pondered it a month, and sends this pardon.”

“Now,” I said when the sad story was ended, “warden, I want to ask a favor. Let me present this pardon to him in person. I understand that it makes him free from this hour; I wish to study the human face in the moment when the revelation that he is free dawns on his mind. May I do this?”

“Certainly,” was the answer, and striking a silver bell, a “trusty” appeared. He said, “Tom, bring John R. to my office at once.”

While waiting, I said, “Does he expect a pardon?”

“No,” was the answer, “he knows nothing of the efforts to set him free. It will be a total surprise to him.”

In a few moments the trusty returned with the man he was sent to summon. The jail garb did not wholly hide his handsome form, nor the cropped hair entirely vulgarize the intellectual countenance which fell as he saw strangers looking at him. He seemed to wonder why he was ordered up before the warden; there was shame, sorrow, helplessness in his face as I rose, with the paper in my hand and walked toward him.

“John,” said the warden, “this gentleman has a few words to say to you.”

The convict braced himself for the interview, and I said, “Your name is John R., I believe.” “Yes,” he replied steadily.

“I have here,” I went on, “a paper addressed to you, signed by the President of the United States. It is a pardon. You are a free man, John.”

The look of assumed courage in his eyes changed to one of infinite pathos, then softened piteously as his soul swooned with joy that was almost too much. I saw him sway as if to fall, but caught him, and leaning on my shoulder, he said, “Free! free! O God, is it true? When can I go home?” “This very moment,” said I. He looked wistfully out the great door where the sentry stood, and asked, “Can I go out there now.”

“Yes,” I said, “come, I will go with you,” and arm in arm we walked down the great stone stair, passed the guards into the street and across to a fence beyond. He stopped a pace or two away, looked at the emerald hills, the river flowing by, the children passing, the firmament above, and as the happy tears drenched his face, said: “O, sir, I am the happiest man alive. When does the train start East?” “At three,” I said, “I will see you safely started.”

“Wont my wife and baby Jess be glad to-morrow, and mother, how she will smile; I am eager to be off.” I took him in and soon saw him fitted with the civilian’s clothes and provided with the railway ticket to his destination, and with the $10 the State gives every released convict.

How proudly he walked by my side to the station, and as the bell clanged, he held my hand and said, “You talk to hundreds of young men. Sir, tell them this, tell it with burning eloquence, tell it with pleading tears, beware of gaming, shun gamblers as lepers. Cards are accursed of God, and pass-ports to perdition. Will you tell them this?” And as the train moved off I said, “I will.”

To this end I write a chapter in this book, that by earnest warning or brotherly appeal, I may help to pluck young men out of the hands of this giant enemy of our race, and perhaps halt some who are already hurrying down this highway to dishonor. Standing here at the very gates of these polluted temples, where many have been cruelly “done to death,” I raise the cry “beware of gaming. It dishonors God, degrades man, wrecks honor, ruins business, destroys homes, breaks wifely hearts, steals babes’ bread, brings mothers sorrowing to the grave, and at last, with reckless bravado, launches the sinful soul into the path of God’s descending wrath, to be overwhelmed forever.”

The only argument offered by gamblers is that their business keeps money in circulation. It does, indeed, transferring it from the pocket of the fool to that of the knave, and thence to the pockets of the harlot or rum-seller, but there is no gain in this transaction. Better the money had remained where it was, or been put to other uses.

Young men will read these words who know not one card from another; who have no personal knowledge of lotteries, raffles, dice or betting. Yours is blissful ignorance, honorable innocence.

How I love the youth who can say, when cards are brought out for play in a private house, “I do not know one card from another. I have no desire to learn their use.” Young heart of oak, give me thy hand. Some will sneer, I charge you to keep your honor bright.

Though people of good character persuade and gloss this evil, stand firm as the hills. Should professing Christians (God pity them) make of the painted paste-boards a social snare, be the company never so charming, the stakes never so trifling, beware. Once you play the first game, you are on the slant; the descent is smooth and swift, and the end is terrible.

You will hear sophistries about the difference between playing and gambling, and the harmlessness of cards and other Devil’s toggery. Playing is the egg out of which the cockatrice is hatched. Handle it not.

Climbing a slippery pass in the Alps, one comes to a narrow icy path with a great rock on the one hand, and a deep gorge on the other. It is called by the guides the “Hell Place,” and you are asked to creep cautiously there, a slip is destruction. The green cloth of the gaming table is the moral hell place to many souls; to this, sorrowing relatives, weeping wives, heart-broken mothers can point and say, “There my boy slipped, there my husband fell, lost property, position, honor, all.” At the foot of this slant is the prisoner’s cell, the maniac’s cage, the suicide’s grave; at the top the smiling decoy, shod with adder skin, or the smooth tongued gamester, waiting to lure men to the fatal hazard.

Some will read these words who are already acquainted with the beginnings of this honeyed vice. They have shuffled the satanic pack, booked the bet, and perhaps pinched themselves in purse to pay the lost wager, or have now in pocket the coins won at gambling. Take these coins out and look at them; they are unclean, polluted.

Once, when the plague ravished an English village, the wretched people resorted to the bank of the stream near by, to get bread left there for them. They tossed the coins for payment into the brook where they were found hours afterwards by those who sold the food. They thought the water had cleansed the pestilent contagion from the coins. Perhaps it had, but no brook, river or sea hath tide medicinal enough to cleanse the curse from money won at gaming. It is cankered. It is blood-stained and tear-rusted. It will curse him that wins and him that loses.

My friend, you are yet only a novice in this black art. Let me, by all rational appeal, abjure you to abstain. It is the father of falsehood, forgery and fraud, and the covetous human heart is the mother of this ill-gotten brood.

Can you specify _one_ instance where the gains of gambling have brought comfort or contentment? What would your father think, your employer say, if they knew that you were a gamester, spending your evenings where these human swine whet their tusks? Who sinks so low in the mire of infamy as the man who is kicked out of business or society with the millstone of gambling hung to his neck? Bitter is the ban and black is the brand put on the wretch whose hardened forehead is set against the hissing of that word “gambler.”

Who are the associates a man finds at races and the card table? Are they not the Pariahs, social lepers whose touch is pollution? Would a man take his sisters or his children among these white-fanged wolves; are they not nameless at the hearth, unknown where high-toned and virtuous people meet? Think of the vile talk, the impure jest, the unclean associations. You cannot stoop to this. What can money buy, though you won every wager, that will repay you for the loss of wifely love, childhood’s trust, the father’s proud faith in his boy.

Consider the malign vicissitudes of this sport, see the ruined, forsaken, nerveless gambler, wrecked and wretched at last; abandoned to the gibes of men, and the anger of God; crawling into a lazaretto to die. Mother, with dimpled hands upheld to you at evening, and fair head pillowed on your bosom, think not, “My bonnie boy is safe.” This fiend spares none. He will seek this braw lad to destroy him. With devilish cunning he will even persuade you to aid in your son’s downfall; to teach him in the social game, to use the leprous papers of the pit, on which is inscribed the voiceless litany of woe.

Hell’s utmost anguish surely has no deeper depth than that of the mother who sees her son a degraded, sodden gamester, and remembers that she taught him to handle the implements of his ruin. If a mother can front the judgment and say, “I never countenanced the evil, I bitterly opposed it always, to the utmost of my power,” she may feel when her dear son is lost, the most unspeakable regret, but she escapes the remorse which eats the heart of her who unwittingly fostered the serpent which compassed her child’s destruction. Let us ring our children round with circles of flame across which none of these man hawks can come. Let us make home the happiest place on earth. With mirth, laughter, music, books, friends; a safe refuge, a snug harbor, a shadow of a great rock, and a citadel for defence of our dear ones from this pitiless foe.

Let me sketch the career of an upright, kindly village youth who longs for a wider field of action. He has mastered the elements of business as practiced in the rural community; he desires to try his talents in the busy world, and chooses a mighty city as the field of his endeavor. A roaring center of commercial activity; its streets a throbbing ganglion of business nerves; its mart the engorged plexus of traffic, where the best and the worst have habitation.

As I see this young fellow, with face like an open book, standing for the first time in the city’s streets, I am reminded of a scene I once witnessed in the country. I stood on the edge of a wood looking across a beautiful meadow. It was a perfect day in June, and all the world seemed at peace. Crickets were chirping in the grass, the yellow-hammer was tapping on a tree above, the cattle were grazing brisket-deep in the lush grass, the birds were singing as if to breathe were music. All nature looked lovely. Far away across the brook, on a dead tree, I noticed a number of buzzards, waiting for the sight of something on which they might gorge their unclean appetites.

I think of this as I watch him alone on the city’s street at evening, gazing into a window where the light falls on diamonds, opals, rubies; amid the din of the city, near the theaters and saloons, where music throbs, lamps flare, cabs rattle, and through these noises comes a voice in modulated semi-tones from one standing at his side, who asks: “Did you hear of the big winning last night.” “No, sir, where was it?” “Up the street, at old Brad’s place, No. 197. A fellow won $6,000 in two hours. I am going up to try my luck. Come along, just for the fun of the thing.” He goes. The front of the house is dark; a red light burns over the stairway door—danger signal over a bottomless abyss. He is void of understanding; a private key, pass word, or patron of the game is needed to secure entrance. The panel of the door slips aside, a whisper, then a reply. The door opens, upstairs they go. Men seated and standing scarcely look up—wheels click—dice rattle—cards shuffle—glasses clink—sooty servants glide with trays, and bottles—cheap stucco statuary appear through the smoke—muttered curses tell of losses. He is led to the faro table, where a mastiff-faced man deals cards, and after he has sipped a little liquor, which is freely offered, he tells his guide that he has never played. He is informed that a man always wins his first bet—fortune favors first play. Men put chips in his hands, saying, “Play this bet for me.” “But I don’t know the cards,” he replies. “Put the bet down on any card, it will surely win.” Down it goes—it wins—and as they rake in the gains, he thinks, “I might have won a month’s salary in a moment.” Lightly as snowflakes fall the cards; deft the touch; swift the shuffle. It seems so simple. He carries money saved from a father’s toil, a sister’s earnings offered to help him secure his stock of goods to start business. Mother has helped him, saying, “David will help me when I need his help. I will have a strong son to lean on when my old feet dip down falteringly to the cold river of death.”

As he hesitates there on the porch of Perdition, he is about to bid farewell to peace, farewell to prospects of success, farewell to the promise of his young manhood, farewell to the prayers of his parents. Pray, mother! with clasped hands kneeling at this very hour under the pictures in your boy’s room. Pray, “God be gracious to my boy. Gird him round with mercy.” Sing, sister, sing! Sitting alone where the moon- light falls on thy fingers as they wander over the keys, sing soft and low the very hymn you sang at parting, “God be with you till we meet again.” Sing! maiden, till the tears falling fast tell the fears uprising in thy heart.

Look, old father, down the road where the peaceful world lies transfigured in the mellow beams of the moon; down the road where he went away so cheery, brave, tender, looking backwards from the coach with many a wave of the hand and fond goodbye. Listen, father to the whip-poor-will in the copse answering the katydid in the hedge, frogs shrilling from the swamp, an owl hooting from the woods; the air grows cold, a chilling sense of discomfort shakes thy frame.

Ah, if thou couldst see thy son now, thy hope, thy pride—among knaves. He stakes his means—he wins—he has doubled his fund. Good, good—his face glows, his pulses are rhythmic to the music of success. Excited, confident, reckless, he loses—doubles his loss—forgets all prudence, unrolls the savings of years on the little farm—mother’s needle, father’s plow, sister’s music lessons, earned that hoard. He piles it on the board with burning eyes set on the cards, watches them coming one by one. Oh, unpicturable horror! Money, honor, parental hopes—all earthly and eternal weal staked on that hazard. The Sphinx-faced scoundrel slips the card—the young man hears the word “Lost!”—sees the sharpers laugh as the dealer draws in his all. The room swims before his sight; madness seizes him as the sneering taunt, “Another sucker done up,” smites him like a lash across the face.

Frenzied, he clears the table at a bound, his brown fingers close around the white throat of the lean-faced hellion who has robbed him. Like a tiger uncaged he hurls him to the floor, and fronts the crowd of desperadoes with blazing face. In vain are all his struggles; many leap on him, he is beaten, kicked, hustled down stairs, where, hatless and bruised, he madly pounds the heavy door till his hand is a mass of bleeding pain. All in vain. He turns helplessly at last to the street, and through the gray light of dawn finds his room. For hours he hangs on misery’s brink; haggard remorse sits opposite and suggests suicide. Swift as a homing dove his thoughts fly to the farm.

He sees his father in the furrow, his mother in the doorway, her face as radiant as the morning. She gathers a few honeysuckles for his empty room, to her it is a sanctuary now, and he liked them so, and ’twill seem as though he was coming home soon.

An organ beneath his room strikes up an air heavy with old memories; the tune of “The Old Folks at Home,” quavers through his window. With a shuddering cry—“A gambler! a gambler! Oh, God, be merciful; let me die,” he falls by the bedside and burning tears are vain to staunch the hurt in his heart.

He is now in a whirlpool; return seems impossible. You have seen an apple tree in May, rosy in pink and white blossoms, murmurous with bees, glad with birds and glorious with sunshine. In one night the frost kills the bloom; next day the tree hangs with damp, blighted blossoms and blackened buds, an unlovely spectacle.

Few escape the bitter end who begin a gamester’s career.

Next we find him in snuggeries, curtained from basement bar-rooms, studying the cards at midnight, robbing unwary verdants. Conscience is seared as with a hot iron. His heart is flint. He strives with drink to banish thoughts of home, heaven and God; grows morose, cunning, merciless; works a little, hurries again to the feverish excitement of the game, herds with greasy disreputables in foul dens, amid the reek of pipes and hideous blasphemy. Soiled, ill-kempt, rag-clad, he nears the bottom of the slant. One night, crazed with vile rum, he mingles in a fight with fellow outcasts; blood is shed; the alarm brings the clattering patrol wagon, and through the red of early dawn he rides to a cell in murderer’s row. Convicted, condemned, he goes to prison for life—years pass—his sorrowing parents think him dead. He _is_ dead. He died that night when he climbed the stairs to “Old Brad’s den.”

His post is to open and close a gate in the prison yard. Seven years in stripes, taciturn, sullen, he stands there. His soul starves, his heart stagnates, his face becomes stupidly half-human, despair feeds on his mind.

One day two visiting gentlemen see him, they recognize him and speak, holding out a hand which he will not take, trying to stir hope within him. They talk to him of freedom and home. He makes no sign of pleasure; hopeless vacuity rests on his imbruted face. He stares at his gate, shuts it, and says, “Seven years dead, seven years dead.” There he stands, and will stand, till carried to the little graveyard of the prison, touching at last the lowest level of the slant on which the gambler stands.

I charge you with a jealous affection, born of an unfeigned brotherhood, and based on many years study of the effects of this vice. Beware of the beginning of gambling. Have no commerce with the monster iniquity.

First of all, because it _dethrones God_. Seek its victims in the ranks of bankrupt merchants, in the cells of criminals, in the cellars of shame, or garrets of poverty; talk with them, or with those who have suffered through them, and you will find that the sad sequence of misery began with this heinous affront to God, viz: a practical denial of His very existence and a setting up in His place a blind deity called Chance, before whom they bowed, and on whose favor they risked their all. Even if in their darkened minds the votaries of gaming allow God to exist, they deny His government of the affairs of men. They flee away from all works that can win the help of Jehovah, and ask only the help of fortune. This is heathenry of the worst sort. The farmer plows, plants, cultivates, and hopes that the God of nature will help him by sending sun, rain and dew, that together they may produce the harvest. The sailor, by the march of the constellations and the veracity of the magnetic needle which God offers for his guidance, comes at last to port. The mason builds his wall by the laws of God, and his plumb line and level bear eloquent witness that he wishes to base his work on the certain laws which steadfastly bind the worlds together. These men, however much they ignore God in their speech, keep faith with Him in their work, knowing full well that they can only succeed in any task by keeping in line with His laws. Thus they have yoked the elements to the car of progress. The gambler, however, mocks at God’s laws and insolently banishes Him. He asks no help from fixed laws ordained by the Father to bless his children; he scorns the co-operation of Nature, sets up a fetish called Fortune, and grovelling, courts its smiles. I know of no form of paganism more base than this, and it is not surprising that in the worship of this block-eyed god, the most obscene rites and debasing superstitions are practiced. Dreams, charms, spells, incantations, black art, even the help of the powers of darkness have been used in wooing his favor. The most frightful depths of moral and mental depravity are touched in this shameful business. The negro who sells stolen articles to buy lottery tickets has some gruesome cabalistic secret which he fondly hopes will bring the favor of fortune; the lady who cons the dream-book in her room to learn which number to buy, and fancies her night vision of a gallows tree or a burning Bible will bring propitious fate, are alike far from reason and from God.

Frogs, spiders, beetles, graveyard grass, rabbits killed in burial places, pieces cut from a shroud or slivers from a coffin will insure winnings. Some put the ticket in the cold hand of a corpse, and the lowest level of blasphemous sacrilege is touched when the bread of the sacrament is carried secretly home to be used as a sort of magic aid to conjure the desired gain. Can anything more awful be conceived by the human mind—nay, could the most malignant devil desire a more direct insult to God than this? First the Creator is asked to abdicate His throne to this monstrous usurper, then the sacred symbols of His Son’s sacrificial death are offered to propitiate the unclean and unholy thing set up in His place. This is the iniquity of Balshazar’s feast repeated in our time. The sacred vessels of His holy worship are employed in the service of sensual lust or abandoned carnality. What shall be the outcome of all this depravity? If these souls seeking the brief success of the gamester deliberately turn away from God and practice harlotry with the princes of hell, wantoning with the powers of the pit in unblushing shame, who will paint their last estate when his vengeance finds them out?

The traveller in Egypt who explores with Arab guides the dismal mummy pits by the Nile finds some startling experiences in these caverns of the dead. More fearsome than the dark labyrinths where the bodies lie wrapped in linen and smeared with ghastly hideousness, more terrible than the gloomy grottos where cadavorous mortality swathed in silence waits the resurrection trump, is that grisly cave where the bats, the unclean birds, make their home. Into this the hardiest guides dare not go. The uncanny creatures invade it in myriads, and with their fluttering, furry vans, would quench the light and drive out the bravest intruder. If one desires a sight of these birds, he stands in the sunlight at noon close to the rocky ledge which walls the gardens of the Pharoahs. A shiek, musket in hand, steps a few paces into the vault. His gun is fired directly into the Plutonian chamber with a roar as if an earthquake was shaking the knees of the eternal hills. Then a dark torrent of winged things, with a sound as of a mighty wind, sweeps out into the light, fluttering the sweet air into horror with leathern wings. They fly about in circles and dart back, pained and dazzled by the light, into their obscene home. Some in blindness, eager to escape the sun, dash themselves against the rocky lintel and posts of the entrance, and fall broken and mangled at your feet, as tremblingly you shrink from the bruised clots fluttering in dying spasms about you.

Such shall be the condition of these poor blinded souls who choose darkness rather than day, leaving the light of the smile of heaven to dwell in the gloomy precincts where the gamester’s deity sits in grim mockery and receives the worship of his clans. Suddenly, with a mighty shout, shall their leaden souls be wakened to their shame. The shining Angel, with one sandal on the heaving earth, and the other in the swelling sea, shall cry in trumpet tones that split the silence of earthly crypts and sea deep caves, “Awake, ye dead, and come to judgment!” Then, impelled by a resistless force, shall all souls sweep into the bright light of the great white throne.

Some who have looked at the cross on that lone Syrian hill, shall see one beloved seated thereon, and shall sing for very joy as they press nearer for his greeting. Others who come from the confines of Godless unbelief will be dazzled into blindness by the glory of his presence.

Then shall they call upon the rocks to fall upon them, and say to the hills, “Hide us from the face of the Lamb.” Frenzied, they will essay to flee back into their former holes, dashing their souls, bruised and ruined, against the adamantine front of God’s eternal laws, and drop shrieking into Perdition, where the Prince of gamesters, catching them to himself, will say, “Souls are stakes. The game is done. All these I have won.”

Not only does gambling dethrone God, but it _degrades man_. In this evil work it is the most certain and effectual of all vices. It commonly works in iniquitous league with other sins, but alone it eats out honesty, affection and virtue from the heart, and leaves it as empty as a dead man’s hand.

When this vice has had free course through the moral nature for a few years, the man is a mere shell, a human husk, within all is punk and hollowness.

The law by which the force of gravitation acts is not more resistless or irrevocable than this law of gaming. Other vices give their devotees intervals of rest, intermissions growing briefer until the last stages bring woe upon the heels of woe to drive the victim to his doom. The gambling demon, once admitted to the mind, never leaves. He haunts his slaves every waking hour, and flits on filthy wings athwart his dreams, spectre-like he walks at his side, keeping pace for pace with his prey. The swift result of his influence is complete moral atrophy.

Ask yourself this question: Where is the dearest spot to man in all the wide creation’s bound? Search all the stars that God has spilled like jewels through the blue abyss. Roam from bloom to bloom of that tree once enrapt in primeval night, which, at his word, burst into blossoms of worlds like this. Yea, visit heaven itself, explore the city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God; the city of the jewelled walls and gates of pearl. Stand where the healing trees trail their branches in the crystal river of life; or walk amidst the asphodel and amaranth that deck the fadeless green of the Paradise of the Saints, and you will not find one spot so dear, so precious to our race, as that Judean hill whereon hangs one whose holy hands were nailed for our salvation on the cross. There, where wondering heaven bends to look pityingly on the exalted one, where dumb nature strives with darkened skies to hide the shame, where man, mad with rage, curses the Christ, and woman, bowed with sorrow, bewails her lord. There, on that most sacred spot in all the universe, in the holiest hour ever marked on the dial of time, when heaven, earth and hell are quick with interest, who is it sits unmoved, unobservant, unstirred, concerned only with the game? Ruthless gamblers sit beneath the lowering skies, and on the palsied earth they shake the dice to win the garments of the man of sorrows.

This infamy was needed to make Christ’s death as ignominious as a demon could desire. Only Apollyon could suggest the shameful scene on which the dying eyes of the Son of man rested, as the crowning demonism of it all. A group of gamblers bending over the few robes which were all his possessions. O, Satan, that was a monster stroke to embitter his last hour! No other being but a gambler could have put a fit climax to that day’s iniquity.

As I think on the merciless nature of the abandoned gamester, I am reminded of the story told of a petrified forest in Idaho. “Yes,” said the yarn spinner, “you can see trees standing there petrified, bushes and vines, leaves and buds and all, petrified, and there stands a hunter with his gun up. He has just shot a hawk in the air, and the hawk hangs dead in the air, petrified.” “O, that’s too much,” remarked a bystander, “the law of gravitation would bring the hawk down.” “Not at all,” said the other, “the law of gravitation is petrified too.”

In the gambler’s nature all natural feelings seem petrified. He never relents or pities. His drink is fen-water, his meat is adder’s flesh. Innocent men are the victims of his callous covetousness. Women and children are deprived of the money needed for the comforts and even the necessities of life. Trust funds and moneys belonging to others swell his ill-gotten gains, and as revealed in the pathetic history of the author of this volume, he is such a thrall to sin that a father’s pleading, a mother’s prayers, even that best blessing which God can give a man, a true, chaste woman’s wifely love, are forgotten to follow this evil passion that rages like a fire in his bosom. He is like a strong swimmer enmeshed in treacherous seaweeds which seem so easily broken, but cling to hands and feet more strongly than chains, and at last wrap him in death as he goes with a despairing cry down to lie in the ooze at the bottom.

If all who have been ruined in temporal and eternal things by it could rise and walk in sad procession through the land, the spectacle would appal the stoutest heart. If all the names of the men undone by this art could be written on the cards used to-day in gaming, every one would be signed across with the blood-red autograph of a doomed soul.

The fountains of Monaco seem to drip tears, and in the odorous shrubbery the wind sighs like the echo of the last cry of the bond slave led captive from its sinks of sin. Were it not for the stupifying spell gambling throws on all its thralls, the licentious associations and scrofulous surroundings of the play might stir the soul to escape from its condemnation. Fathers have wept over lost sons; tender children over disgraced fathers, downcast sisters have beseechingly invoked vengeance on a brother’s destroyers, and wives with little ones clinging to their skirts have implored with tearful eloquence the gamester to break the bonds that held him. All in vain. He mingles with the moral refuse of the land, plunges deeper in degradation, becomes an inmate in these habitations of cruelty, and with all the pith and marrow of mankind sucked out, with blood poisoned and bone rotted, he consorts with drunken sailors, filthy women and skulking vagrants, playing with unsteady hand for the few coins he can gather, till death with the besom of a nameless disease sweeps his foul carcass into the pauper’s grave.

Of all men, he seems to me the most spectral and bloodless, the most effectually blighted and paralyzed. How the virtuous person shrinks from one who is pointed out as a gambler. If you wish to see what nature thinks of this vice, look into his face. Women of fair fame shun him. Children avoid him on the street, and men pass him with averted faces. Burns, in his strange poem of “Tam O’Shanter,” tells how the tipsy hero peers into “Alloways auld haunted kirk,” and watches the witches’ unearthly dance, taking note of what lay upon the holy table. Surely ’tis a chilling catalogue as he writes it:

“A murderer’s bones in gibbet irons,
Two span-long wee unchristened bairns
A garter which a babe had strangled,
A knife a father’s throat had mangled
Whose own son had him of life bereft,
The gray hair yet stuck to the heft.”

Now fancy another son of this murdered father using this bloody knife as a plaything. Such the cards used in gaming seem to me—hideously stained with the blood of loved ones, and I would as soon think of rattling the handles of my baby’s coffin for music, as shuffling the cards for pleasure. I can appreciate the feeling of that man who was one of a shipload of passengers wrecked on the Atlantic coast some five years ago. In the bitter freezing night they clung to the rigging, and when about to let go and die, one put his hand in his pocket and took out the cards they had been playing with and tossed them into the angry sea, saying, “Boys, I don’t want to go into the presence of God with a deck of cards in my pocket.” More than one “happy couple” have I married only to see the wife deserted that the husband might throw their all into the whirlpool of chance. More than one little home have I seen engulfed in this maelstrom. Many a servant cheats his master, many an employe robs his employer; many a wife abstracts part of her husband’s earnings, thus breeding domestic strife, to cast it all into the coffers of the lottery or the policy shop.

I personally know a man once bright, respected and promising, who takes some of the money his wife earns teaching music, to play faro. Not long ago a man supposed to have a competence died. His heirs found his estate had been squandered, nothing was left save several hundred lottery tickets, which told the story of his folly and his children’s beggary.

What merchant wants a gambler for a clerk? What boss wants a gambler for a workman? What foreman wants a gambler for an apprentice? What family wants a gambler for a doctor? What firm wants a gambler for a salesman? What railway wants a gambler for a conductor? What boy would wish to learn so disgraceful a trade? At the time that I was apprenticed to the bricklaying trade, I knew a lad who began to herd with gamesters. He learned that trade, I learned mine. He earned money; so did I. I was proud of mine, and now I hold up my hands and say, “If my voice should fail, I have an honest trade in my fingers by which I can win my bread.”

I take my little ones in this very city to the walls where I worked. I show them the courses of brick their father laid, and proudly tell the story of my toil. Can this other man do likewise? Can he hold up his hands before men and say, “I have an honest trade in my fingers”? Can he take his children and show them his work, and tell them with glad face the story of his apprenticeship? No, no; his face crimsons when his trade is mentioned, and though he spent more years at it than I did at mine, he is ashamed of his work to-day.

Young men, learn an honest trade which tends toward manliness. Be content with simple life and frugal means until you can rise honorably to luxuries. Acquire no money by sinful methods. Do not begin gaming as a relaxation, for it will soon become a business. Avoid pool-rooms, race-courses, faro banks, cockfights, policy shops, lotteries, raffles, betting of every form. All such things are perilous. Where one grows rich, one hundred grow poor, and the one who wins is poorest of all. No man is as pitiably poor as the man who has money won by gambling. This form of evil doing will tempt you everywhere, on rail train and steamboat, in hotels, clubs and barber shops; in the loft of the barn, or the carpeted parlor. On the race-track and fair grounds, week days and Sundays, day and night, winter and summer, at home or abroad, in public and private, it will meet you. The suave snob, the seedy scoundrel, will inveigle you, try to win your confidence, borrow or lend, lead or drive; coax or threaten, sometimes with words smooth as butter, then with words that smite like hail. Stand fast, my son. “When sinners entice thee, consent thou not.” Money unearned is blessingless. God’s law is this: If man gets anything from nature he must give labor. If he gets anything from his neighbor he must give a fair equivalent. Only money gotten in this way can bring a blessing.

What does the gambler give his victim in return for his money? Nothing. One of these gold pieces would make the weary wife smile, but the impassive harpy with the cold face and the fire of Gehenna in his heart cuts and deals, shuffles and sorts, then takes all, giving no return but a sneer.

If you think to beat him at his own game, you will know your folly when over your head the waves of misery have met. His motto is: “There is a fool born every minute.” His place is called a “Hell,” and the name fits it like a kid glove. His victim is called a “lamb,” he is led to be fleeced, and driven forth to shiver. The thorough-bred gambler suckled snow for mother’s milk, and all the blood in his frozen heart could be carried in a bottomless cup. There is consolation for other woes, but for losses in gambling there is none. No man will pity you. None will sympathize with you, the very best you can hope for is that they will not laugh as they pass you by.

Do you say that you must have excitement, something to break the dull monotony of existence? Well, if you wish to break the monotony of food, you need not take arsenic, nor break the monotony of drink by prussic acid. Guard yourself just here; the love of excitement ruins thousands. The jaded mind needs a fillip. One tries the play; the death scene in the fourth act excites him. Another tries rum or brandy, another the impure novel; another opium or morphine; another travels to far lands; another lechery; another gambling, and the last is the worst of all. There are wholesome excitements which never enslave and have no bad reaction; which develop, broaden and brace the whole being, but keep clear of gamblers, they are a pack of scullions, experts at thievery, masterhands at cheating. Gyved diabolists who would rape your soul of all that makes life blessed.

I stood in this city beside the coffin of a lovely babe; sweeter child the sunshine never kissed. The mother sat dissolved in tears, with a bright boy holding to her gown. Women tried to comfort her; then I tried. I spoke of the little spirit safe in the arms of Jesus, but lifting her streaming eyes, she said sadly, “It is not the baby’s death, sir, I can endure that. I would not have her back in this cold world. It is my husband’s absence. Oh, that he did not come at this hour to help me.” I questioned the neighbors in the room, and they said, “Her husband is a gambler, does not come home for weeks. She sent him word of the child’s death, but he came not.” Standing there by that lily bud broken from the stem, I thought, “How can a man be so heartless as to stain the forehead of his child with such a wrong” Heartless? A gambler carries a cinder where the heart should be.

A wife, almost demented with grief, about to be cast out of her house for unpaid rent, went to the mousing scamps who had filched her husband’s money for years, and in broken accents asked for help. With ribaldry, the underlings scoffed her out of their room, while the metallic faced dealer sat with the veto of silence on his mouth, till she staggered to the street _mad_, and is to-day a maniac.

An old father receives a letter telling of his son’s downfall, and his aged form falls prone upon the floor of the village post office where he reads the letter. When gentle hands restored him to consciousness he opened his eyes, and when they said, “We thought you were dead.” “Would God I had died,” he replied. “Life is naught to me now.” For years afterward that old man, with mind dethroned, went about the village, writing in the snow or the sand, on the walls and fences, the name of his lost son.

I would like to open the seven vials of the wrath of the Most High and spill them on this nefarious industry. Every day the press tells of some official, treasurer, agent or partner who has fallen or fled, a ruined man, and uncounted thousands suffer their shame unknown.

It is on record that one lottery drawing in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held blank tickets. What rapacious miscreants they must be who ply this trade of spoilation.

As I study the character of this obdurate and unprincipled human wolf, I see only one trait that is worthy of praise; the zeal and strategy displayed in his gross rascality.

As I contrast this with the apathy of many of the virtuous men who seek to lead the people in ways of rectitude, I recall the reply of the Scottish fisherman to the listless angler who caught nothing, while the old hand was steadily filling the creel. “What is the difference, Sandy?” asked the dawdler, “between your fishing and mine?” “Dinna ye ken the difference, mon? You are fishin’ for fun and I’m fishin’ for fish.” Would that we who work in the laudable employment of saving and reforming men, were as busy and as full of resources as these reprehensible foes of society!

Perhaps the young man who reads these words will ask, “How can I keep my mind from defilement and escape the lure of these soul destroyers?” There is only one sure way, and then there is one not so sure. By the simple moral integrity of your soul and a happy bias of natural temperament you may stand firm amid all temptations and come through unscathed. Some have been able to come forth conquerors with these weapons, but many have failed.

The better way, the surer way, is to make a friend and associate early in life of Him who is mighty to save; to cling close to Him with tremorless trust, and take from Him such blameless pleasures as shall make this and all other vicious indulgences seem mean. Remember the mythical story of the sirens who decoyed men to death. When the wise Ulysses had to sail hard by the enchanted isle, he bound the sailors fast to the mast with knotted ropes, and when the ravishing strains of their music floated over the waves they could only tug at their cords, they could not go to their death. The sweet singer Orpheus had to steer his boat over the same dangerous course, but he tied no man. He left them bodily free to leap into the sea and swim to their destruction, but he bound their souls with chords of such heavenly harmonies struck from his lute, that they sailed heedless under the lee of the fateful island, steeped in such ecstacy of melody that they heard not one note of the siren’s song.

It is well to bind the passions and lusts with strong vows and good resolutions. It is best of all to have the soul bound by the heaven-born spell which fills the whole being with delight. This bliss ineffable makes earthly and carnal joys seem contemptible, and drowns every evil desire in the great cry from the heart’s depths:

“Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee.”

The third count in this black indictment is that gaming not only dethrones God and degrades man, but destroys the most blessed of all human institutions, the home.

Gamblers flock together as naturally as lean-necked vultures; they hunt in packs like coyotes, and intermingle like a knot of clammy vipers that crawl in the dank gloom of a sunless canyon. They have no share in the sweet sanctities of the fireside, and desire vehemently to be elsewhere. Even when the gamester sits at his own table, or embraces his own children, his heart is in another place. Physical contact is not intimacy. He may kiss the wife of his bosom and be as far from her as the east is from the west. Judas kissed Christ, yet at that moment one was in heaven and the other in hell. He hurries away to boon companions, and to the familiar scenes his soul covets. In vain the little ones beseech him to abide at home, in vain the wife entreats him to continue at work, in vain the mother asks the comfort of his presence, the help of his strong arm. He hopes to make a great winning some day, to buy a fine house for his family, then to make amends, turn over a new leaf, and soberly take up the duties of manhood. Some lucky hazard, some windfall, wager or lot will lift him to the level of his dreams. Meanwhile he sinks deeper, debauches himself more and more, till home becomes a hateful place; he deserts his family, or in self-defense is forbidden to cross the sill of the house he has desecrated.

I have gone on missions of comfort to the homes of the drunkard, the bankrupt, the convict, the dying, but never have I seen on woman’s face such unutterable grief and pitiable misery as in the home of the gambler. A cyclone cannot level, nor a fire consume a home so surely as gambling. The infatuated bondman to this vice will let the fire go out on the hearth where his helpless brood crouches in the cold. He will let them ask mother in the lampless twilight with tear-stained faces, why papa does not come. How can the wife tell the weans, what delays his steps?

Was ever woman’s love insulted as he insults it? If some pure passion for art or high scientific research detained him, she would smile, and explain it to the little ones. If profound books or merciful work of benevolence kept him late; if some grave problem of social welfare held him from her arms for awhile, she could bide the time, but the indignity put on her is this, that a loving, virtuous wife with all womanly charms and gentle ministries, waits unheeded while he consorts with disreputable dicers, and the clinging kisses of sweet-lipped babes are forgotten that he may enjoy the company of a lot of heartless card mongers hanging on the frayed edges of society.

When a man will toss away the priceless jewel of wifely love to clutch a bubble like this, turn from a warm, throbbing, palpitant, gentle help- meet to herd with jackals, he puts a shameful affront on her, one that he will have to answer for at the bar of God.

The deluded man is chasing a phantom and hoping to find a happiness that ever eludes him. He could find happiness at home in domestic helpfulness and fatherly endearments. He is like the Scandinavian lover who coveted a kiss from his sweetheart, and said, “I wish I could, some day, find the lost whistle of the Fairy Queen. She has promised to grant one wish to the man who finds it.” “Well,” said the maiden, “if you did find it, what would your wish be?” “It would be this,” said the timid youth, “that I might have one kiss from your red lips.”

“Then the maiden laughed out in her innocent glee,
What a fool of yourself, with that whistle you’d make,
For only consider how silly ’twould be
To sit there and whistle for what you might take.”

The autobiography of the author of this book shows plainly that he had true happiness within his reach. He had wealth, talents, friends, good personal presence, and best of all, a beautiful and gracious wife who truly loved him. Here are all the elements of happiness, yet he went longing for something else, blind to the joys he might have had.

If I should ever write a book on “How to be miserable,” (though married) I would put down as the first condition, let the husband take to gambling. It will assuredly overturn the home, and without a home, man can have but little bliss in this world.