By J. Ramsay MacDonald

The devotees of the Goddess of Fortune are found in all societies, from the Kaffir tribe to the sensuous coteries of our own civilisation. The moment of uncertainty which lapses between the casting of the dice and the discovery of the result, between the dealing of the cards and the examination of the hand, between the starting of the ball and its settlement in a pocket, is an alluring experience which rules conduct in proportion to the weakness of the moral character and the disorganisation of the intellectual life. The unknown must always have a fascination for men, and that fascination, centred on trivial things and joined with cupidity, marks the low state of intelligence and morals in which gambling flourishes.

I

Almost every observer to-day agrees that betting has reached colossal proportions and is still increasing. At the street corner, in the newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop, in the barber’s saloon, in the club, in the public-house, in the factory, the bookmaker or his agent is ready to receive the money of men, women, and children, and victims of the habit are at hand to lead astray the novices still uninitiated in the worship of the seductive goddess.

The chief characteristic of the present outburst of the gambling habit is that it is becoming a class disease. People of experience seem to be pretty much agreed that those living on the marginal line of poverty and those on the marginal line of respectability are specially liable to fall victims to the habit. Both of these classes have in common a feeling that their lives are profoundly unsatisfactory. The dreary drudgery of the life of a wage-earner who oscillates between 15s. and 25s. a week, with an occasional turn of nothing at all; the unsatisfied craving in the life of a man too proud to take his place amongst the working classes but too poor and despised to be received in professional ranks—can only lead astray those doomed to them.

To both of these marginal groups the mental excitement and pecuniary allurements of “trying their luck” are almost irresistible, and, though they join in nothing else and in every other respect are poles asunder, they go together to throw their coppers before Fortuna lest haply she may return them favours an hundredfold.

That, I take it, is the most significant feature of the present spread of gambling. It is the evidence of social failure showing itself in the conduct of social groups or classes. It therefore flourishes with other disquieting symptoms, such as the inordinate love of spectacular effect, the demand for mere amusement, the distaste for serious and strenuous effort, the spread of drunkenness—all pointing to a poverty of personality, a bareness of the inner chambers of the mind, occurring in such a way as to indicate that we are faced not merely with the moral breakdown of isolated individuals but with the results of a serious failure on the part of society. We have to deal not merely with individual lapses but with a social disease. From that point of view this paper is written.

Much has been written upon the gambling motive, and I am not sure that the final word has yet been said upon it. Certainly the simple explanations of it as a “sin” do not meet the facts of the case. Avarice does not explain it, because the avaricious do not risk fortunes on the turn of a wheel or the tip of a stableman. And yet avarice enters into the gambler’s character. The pleasure of possessing does not explain it, because if every gambler were to be made as rich as Croesus he would gamble the more. I am inclined to believe that the workman gambles to charm ennui away from his doorstep, and having begun he goes on partly in the hope that he will recoup himself for his losses, partly to continue keeping ennui away. Roughly, the same motives influence the other gambling class—the clerks and the other wage receivers who would fain believe that they are paid “salaries.”[2]

But the particular character of the disease which is bred by the social circumstances of these classes is determined by the law of imitation. As we used to imitate Milan in our millinery and Paris in our dresses, so for our habits there is a class to which we look. If those habits are of the nature of luxuries, we borrow and adapt them from the luxurious classes, and having thus become indebted to these classes we associate our wellbeing with theirs. A parasitic feeling is engendered, and this feeling in turn strengthens the original motive which started us upon our imitative course. Thus we move downwards in a vicious spiral. We must therefore trace the vigour of the present gambling disease not merely to the failure of society to satisfy the appetite for life gnawing unsatisfied at the hearts of whole classes, but to the active existence elsewhere in the same community of sections of idle rich.

Gambling is a disease which spreads downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich. In its most common form, betting on horse-racing, it is the only way in which the outcast plebeians can be joined with their betters in a bond of freemasonry. An elevating knowledge of distinguished jockeys and an exhilarating acquaintance with the pedigree of horses raise the poor parasite to the level of the rich one and make them both men and brothers. One has to go to some famous horse-racing event to appreciate fully the meaning and the force of this.

Consequently, we should expect theoretically to find the gambling habit amongst the poor break out into chronic virulence at a time when the idle rich had received some sudden accession in strength, and when they were blazing forth into a new brilliance of vicious habit. Is not that the case to-day? Did not the serious spread of gambling downwards coincide with a renewal of the splendours of our non-productive, luxurious rich?

Within recent years this class has undoubtedly increased in power, and with that, as has always happened in history, its morals have been degraded. Those who ought to know tell us that not since the days when Brooke’s was in its glory and Frederick was waiting with impatient anxiety for the death of his demented parent, George III., was gambling so prevalent and personal vice so common in society as it is to-day. I have heard on most excellent authority of several thousands of pounds changing hands during an after-dinner game of bridge, at a house which was not the haunt of prodigals, and amongst people who would be insulted if they were called gamblers; certain circles of men and women not very far removed from the centre of political life, who a few years ago spent their spare energies in investigating the mysteries of theosophy and dabbling in the weird, have now turned with absorbing interest to the ubiquitous card game, and guests who do not join in the gamble—often the swindle—find themselves unprotected by the manners which held a guest as sacred.[3]

The sudden flood of easily gotten wealth which came mainly as a result of the exploitation of South Africa, and also partly in consequence of the financier acquiring control of trade by the development of the large over-capitalised syndicate, has not only created a new Park Lane, a nouveau riche and therefore a vulgar one, but has brought in its train a low personal and social morality, and has created in our society purple patches of decadence which can be placed alongside the rotting luxuriance of the Roman Empire. It was so in France when Law’s financial schemes set everybody dreaming of an age of gold and paper money; it was so with ourselves when the South Sea Bubble was being blown up; it will always be so under like circumstances. The influence spreads from one end of society to the other. It colours our newspapers. The tinsel spectacle excites the imagination of the common man or woman. Our charities and philanthropies hang upon the trains of luxurious vulgarity.[4] In a subtle way the grossness at the top percolates through to the bottom, and the plebeian in his own special heavy-footed style dances to the same sensuous tune to which the feet of his betters are more daintily tripping. From the vicious social conditions at the top the gambling impulse finds its way to the bottom. Imitation of the upper classes, even in the most democratic of societies,—and ours is far from that,—continues to have an important influence in the life of the people. Such is the origin of the disease. We must now consider some of its effects.

II

If gambling comes from a poisoned source, it poisons the life with which it is in touch. Other writers in this volume are dealing with the personal and family disasters for which it is responsible. I confine my attention to its influence upon citizenship, upon the persons upon whose intelligence and character rests the fabric of the State and the community.

The gambling disease is marked by a moral and intellectual unsettlement, by an impatience with the slow processes of legitimate accumulation, by a revolt against the discipline of steady growth and sustained action. The gambler lives in a state of unnatural strain. Like an insane person, he stands on the threshold of a grandiose world the high lights of which throw the sober realities of the real into shadow. Moreover, his vice develops the self-regarding instincts into hideous and criminal proportions. What is all this but saying that it cuts away the roots of good citizenship. For good citizenship depends upon a moral discipline which enables a man to pursue, undisturbed by outward event, calm amidst storms of fortune, some desirable social end; it is dependent upon the development of the social conscience in the individual; it flourishes only when men seek after the more solid gains which come from honest work and faithful endeavour. The people to whom the gains of life are but the prize-winnings of a game of hazard, who flock to spectacles, whose sports consist of looking on whilst professionals display their prowess, are but decaying props of State.

Individualists would make us believe that citizenship is not part of personality, for otherwise their antithesis of man versus the State would be inconceivable. But the antithesis is purely verbal, and does not in reality exist. Man’s personality is complex, but it is a unit; his public and private actions may be many sided, and for a time may spring from opposing moral sources, but in the end their exercise blends the opposing sources and changes the individuality. For instance, no people can rule itself democratically at home and govern other peoples autocratically abroad. The home democracy in time becomes tainted. The moral sources of one system become blended with the polluted sources of the other. And so it is with the character of the man and the citizen. The citizen cannot act contrary to the man.

One need hardly trouble to appeal to history to prove these statements. A parallel between our present state of society, rotting with luxury and intoxicated with excitement, and the Roman Empire in the days of its decline is on every moralist’s lips and is becoming hackneyed. Philip of Macedon, it is said, encouraged gambling amongst the Greeks, on the ground that it corrupted their minds and made them docile under his rule. From time to time in our own country the gambling mania has become chronic, the last of these outbursts being about a century ago, when Brooke’s and White’s stripped their foolish victims, and when the flick of cards was heard throughout the abodes of fashion. Of that time Sir George Trevelyan writes:—

The gamblers were in power. There was plenty of party but little politics, and what politics there was was largely an art of recouping gaming losses from the public purse. Public life was saved only by the political overthrow of the gambling aristocracy. Fox, possessing though he did a genius which could throw off the taint of his circumstances, failed mainly owing to his lack of steadiness, dignity, prudence, and industry,[6] and these were precisely the deficiencies which his gambling habits would accentuate. They are the moral and intellectual results of gambling, and follow it as inevitably as gout follows wine-bibbing.

Those of us who fail to see any road leading to a desirable state of society save the political one, those who still believe that democracy is the only form of government under which men can enjoy the blessings of full citizenship, those who consider that in spite of the likes or dislikes of ruling classes government tends to depend more and more upon the sanction of the common people and thus becomes an ever more accurate reflection of their character, can view only with alarm the rapid spread of gambling habits amongst the masses. Where these habits prevail the newspaper, which should be the guide of the citizen, is read not for its politics but for its tips, for the racing news printed in the “fudge,” not for the subjects it discusses in its leader columns, and so is degraded to being the organ of the bookmaker. This does not merely mean an extension of its sporting columns, but a revolution in its tone and its staff, in response to what really becomes a revolution in its functions. Men who are too weary to think, too overworked to attend political meetings or take positions of responsibility in their trade unions, can nevertheless speak authoritatively about the pedigree of an obscure horse and the record of a second-rate footballer.

This, like all other backward steps to a lower stage of moral effort, is easy. For social conduct is the inheritance of complicated experiences, retained only by sleepless vigilance, and exercised by the subordination of the individual will to the social conscience. It is therefore comparable to those high forms of chemical compounds built up of many atoms but exceedingly unstable. The simple presence of a disturbing element shatters the compound and reduces it to its primitive atoms. Man’s self-regarding and primitive instincts are constantly threatening to disjoint his social character and defeat all movements depending upon that character for their success. To hope, for instance, that a labour party can be built up in a population quivering from an indulgence in games of hazard is folly. Such a population cannot be organised for sustained political effort, cannot be depended upon for legal support to its political champions, cannot respond to appeals to its rational imagination. Its hazards absorb so much of its leisure; they lead it away from thoughts of social righteousness; they destroy in it the sense of social service; they create in it a state of mind which believes in fate, luck, the irrational, the erratic; they dazzle its eyes with flashing hopes; they make it, in other words, absolutely incapable of taking an interest in the methods and the aims of reforming politicians. They lay it open to the seductions of the demagogue, to the blandishments of the hail-fellow-well-met type of candidate, to the inducements of the common briber, to the flashy clap-trap of the vulgar and the ignorant charlatan. And the discovery that such classes exist in the community will very soon be made, and the whole tone of public life lowered to suit their tastes. It is not without serious significance that in recent elections one of the most common forms of argument (sometimes used by both sides) has been an offer by the candidates to back up statements they had made by sums of money. “It is not so much,” says Loria, the eminent Italian sociologist, “the personality of the elected as the character of the class which elects that really counts.” I do not say that this is to lead to rapid and irretrievable ruin. Rome bore the burden of a luxurious and gambling class of citizens for centuries. But I do say that the spread of the gambling habit is one of the most disquieting events of the time for those particularly who believe in self-government and in an intelligent democracy using its political power to secure moral and social ends. Every labour leader I know recognises the gambling spirit as a menace to any form of labour party.

III

I have, finally, to consider what good citizenship has to say to gambling, and how it proposes to deal with the matter.

We must remember that this, like so many other vices, is only a degraded and degrading form of expressing a natural human need. Indulgence in gambling is universal in primitive society, where it is closely associated with religion, and at no time is it absent from the larger and more absorbing transactions of civilised life. It is intimately connected with the dominating type of will and the unflinching determination of men to control. The gigantic strides which the United States have made in industry have been possible only because the Americans have not flinched in facing enormous hazards. This spirit finds apt expression in the verse of that romantic embodiment of the love of hazard, the Marquis of Montrose—

In the evolution of the race an important part has no doubt been played by the men and the communities whose self-confidence was sufficiently strong to enable them to make large drafts upon the unknown. Abnormally and respectably—as in the form of genius—this spirit gives us “the man of destiny”; abnormally but not respectably—as in the form of burglary—this spirit gives us the high criminal. Normally, properly controlled and toned, it gives us the successful man of business, the leader and inspirer of men. This playing with the unknown in the faith that the fates are favourably disposed has undoubtedly been, and is still to be, a very important spur to energy, and one of the determining factors in national survivals in the future. Indeed, it is inseparable from human nature. Men will not tolerate a uniform drudgery, they will not live in a world which is nothing but a featureless expanse. And this intellectual appetite for risk, for projecting one’s self on to the silent stream of fate upon which the barque of life mysteriously floats, must be satisfied either legitimately or illegitimately, either in accordance with sound morals or in the teeth of sound morals. The latter will be the case if we condemn, as we do now, large sections of our population to conditions of life from which their intellectual nature can get no satisfaction. The appetites of that nature will not die away. Its functions will not atrophy and degenerate. It will simply accommodate itself to its circumstances. If it cannot command the food of the gods, it will fill its belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and find a troubled satisfaction in its degradation. “To be confined in the dark, or without occupation, is to be made the victim of subjective tedium,” says Bain.[7] We have confined our people in the dark, and they are gambling to break the tedium.

Consequently, when we consider the responsibilities of citizenship for the spread of the gambling disease with a view to devising some cure, we shall have to begin by assuming that prohibitive Acts will not carry us very far. We can stop bookmakers or their agents receiving bets in the public streets or any public place; we can turn them off race-courses and refuse to recognise any enclosure as sanctuary. We can even go further, and prosecute any one who receives from another betting payments on any event whatever. This last would be going very far—too far, perhaps, to be practical. But at any rate we could prohibit the receipt of money from children. We could also stop the publication of betting news, and our Post Office could refuse to transmit circulars encouraging the gambling appetite.[8] We might even combat successfully the much more difficult problem of how to prohibit gambling at church and chapel bazaars. But, when we have done all that, we have not gone very far. We have simply restored life to its old, dull, monotonous drab, and we have turned the natural instincts which the gambling habit satisfies from feeding at one trough to find husks in another. To the great mass of the people we shall but appear to be smug Pharisees, and a reaction will set in which in its aggressive strength will play much greater havoc than even the steady growth of the disease before it was challenged. Time after time the failure of the reform campaigns of outraged respectability in America has taught this simple lesson in moral politics. One cannot devastate and then say, “Behold the good!” The gambling habit must be elbowed out, not stamped out.

I would be exceeding the purposes and limits of this paper did I attempt to sketch a programme of reforms which in my opinion would do the elbowing. I can only indicate the skeleton of such a programme, and I do so, not so much to urge my readers to accept it, as to emphasise that the attack upon the gambling habit can be successful only if it is positive and constructive, and not merely negative and prohibitory.

When we try to get to the root of our social vices of to-day we ultimately find ourselves contemplating the sad effects of the steady stream of population away from the green meadows on to the grey pavements. Overcrowding in the towns and dilapidation in the villages are the result. At best, under existing conditions there must always be a fringe of our city population living from hand to mouth, contracting the character of the casual and the loafer. But this fringe is made much broader by the present urban immigration; the tarnished threads in it are of finer quality than they would be otherwise, and the original excellence of some of its stuff makes it all the more prone to vices of certain kinds. The problem which good citizenship has to solve then, it seems to me, is twofold. It has to discover how people can be induced to stay on the land, and how, in towns, they can be provided with proper surroundings. The only hope of a rural population in England is the spread of intensive cultivation and of co-operative agriculture,[9] and that again can hardly become general until our present system of landlordism is broken up and public authorities own the land and let it to suit the convenience of cultivators.

The town problems must be solved by a combination of public and private associated effort. We must give up all hope of private owners being able to supply decent houses at reasonable rents. The municipality should become the sole housing authority within its own area, and where it spreads out its arms of tramways beyond its own boundaries it should be able to develop building estates on its lines of communication. With a housing and tram policy should be combined a recreation policy, for it is the lack of recreation in modern city life which leads to so many vicious indulgences. Parks, music, museums, libraries, hardly touch the needs of the workman no longer on the sunny side of thirty-five, wearied after a day’s work. The public-house or the workman’s club is his resort.

Here we come to the centre of our difficulty. We cannot meet the needs of the average workman who is not a teetotaller unless we place the public-house under public control. This seems to me to be the first step, not only towards national temperance, but towards the provision of that rational amusement which is to protect our industrial population from vicious allurements.[10]

But when all these facilities for an intellectual life have been provided, they will be in danger of being neglected unless the people who are supposed to benefit by them are led to pursue worthy human ideals. The appreciation of the worthy is an inward quality. Here we come to the saving grace of political convictions, the purifying effect of citizen ideals. An immunity from anti-social indulgences depends upon the general diffusion through society of an active desire for social improvement by democratic means. This acts in two ways. It first of all quickens the social conscience and the moral pride of the common man, and it also safeguards him from imitating the vices of the worthless upper classes, which, without the opposition of a strong democratic spirit, become the models for the recreation and amusement of the masses.

Hence, turning once more for a moment to consider the causes which have led to the present slackening of moral fibre, I find one of the most important to be the loss of the democratic fervour which characterised the people during about three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The people have lost taste for politics. The generous enthusiasms of 1848 are criticised by the aged youth of our schools to-day as having been over-sentimental and mere dreams. At any rate, they gave us sound literature—Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Chambers’s Papers for the People, Cassell’s Popular Educator; they laid the foundations of a most important part of democratic education in the Mechanics’ Institutes; they gave birth to a self-reliant generation of working men. Until citizenship, radiantly setting out towards the splendour of a perfected humanity, attended by a train of the beatitudes which the heart and mind of man have been ever seeking, commands the allegiance and the services of our people, the crowd, obedient to the necessity to worship imposed upon it by its nature, will bow to false gods; and men, obedient to their intellectual promptings to dally occasionally in the temple of Fortuna, will do so in the gross, the only, way which is at present possible for them.