The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-08-15

win five nickels. A winning white slot yields ten nickels, a pink slot fifteen, yellow slot twenty and a blue slot for ty. As there is but one blue space on
 the circumference of the disk and also but one yellow space, and as the win ming blue yields twice as much as the winning yellow, one would suppose that nobody but a bald-headed idiot would ever play the yellow. Yet such is the nature of the spirit of gambling that
 the yellow is played quite as often as
 the blue. The same style of reasoning applies to the whites, which yield ten
 times, while the pinks, of which there are the same number as of the whites, yield fifteen times. Gambling tables have to be made to accommodate all kinds of fools.
 Now apply the law of chance to any
 one of the colors. Say, for instance,
 you deposit your nickel in the red slot.
 There are on the circumference of the disk twenty-three red spaces and forty
 one spaces that are not red. The
 chances are, therefore, forty-one to
 twenty three against your winning on an even bet, or within a fraction of two
 to one. There is not gambling hell in the "Tenderloin'' where such mon-
 strous odds would be tolerated for
 single sitting.
 Say you play the blue. There is but
 one blue space and siXty-three other
 spaces, The chances are sixty-three to one against you, and yet if you win you
 win but forty times your venture. That gives the internal machine over
 fifty per cent. of odds in it's favor.
 There is not a house in the Celestial
 empire, or in Mott street, where the Heather Chinee could be lured to gam
 ble on such terms. The first cowboy
 who comes along with turn for math-
 ematics will blaze away until he has
 perforated every machine on the Pier.
 May his coming be not delayed, for the
 moral and financial havoc being
 wrought is incalculable.
 Hardened sinners and veteran games
 ters, though without turn for mathe-
 matics, avoid the machines after
 brief acquaintance, for they recognize
 intuitively that they are not on the square. The victims are the young, the
 innocent, the unsuspecting, the guile- less, budding maidens, sprouting youths, small boys proud of their first pocket money and venturing it to win applause from their first sweethearts.
 To see lines of care and furrows of anxiety on cheeks which should be rosy
 and rotund is enough to fire the indig- nation of a community. To witness on juvenile scale the horrors of Monte
 Carlo should secure the interference of magistrates. One cannot help think ing how instantaneous and superbly
 righteous would be the action of a Litchfield burgess could his Jurisdiction be extended.
 The profit on these machines must be enormous. It is impossible to acquire any reliable information on the subject. The establishments where they flourish
 refuse information because they are
 paid for silence and protection. About
 some of the machines there are crowds of young people all the day long. By calculation one may reach a remote es- timate of the probable gain. Play is only interrupted by the time it takes the disk to whirl. This cannot be over two or three seconds. To be well with
 in limit allow the disk four whirls to q
 minute. With a five slot nickel ma- chine, and but half the slots played at
 
 nickels, or fifty cents, minute, or thir- ty dollars an hour Many of the ma chimes must be played from six to ten hours a day. To be most moderate let the calculation be based upon an aver age of five hours per machine. That would give each machine daily busi- ness of one hundred and fifty dollars, and a net profit at the rates above sta- tx ought to be well informed states that there are neary one hundred nickel ma
 chimes in and about Narragansett Pier all in active operation. That would swell to five thousand dollars a day the amount to which the public is being daily swindled by these self acting, perpendicular gambling hells! Is there another state in the United States em-
 pire where such things would be possi- ble. The United States is just entered
 upon career of universal humanity.
 Humanity is the active principle of , morality. What moral spectacle to the Porto Ricans, the Hawaiians and the Philippians will the once pious Narragansett be presenting! Alas! for poor humanity; the chances are ten to one that our dusky citizens will tram pie on one another in their eagerness to buck the new self-acting tiger! Ehue fugaces mores!
 The weather continues to be just as bad as weather can be. The sun re- fuses to shine upon so depraved a con- munity. There is so much humidity in
 the air that sneeze provokes a pro- fuse precipitation. When you go out to walk you should take with you an im- 1 mune with mop and a pail; when you write one would think you had selected plotting paper; stamps purchased at
 the post-office are all stuck together before you can carry them half block , away, and new, imported French ferries are being rapidly consigned to rag bags. There never was such a moist and sticky time. If this weather con- tinues Uncle Sam's new yellow fever plant at Montauk cannot fail to be bowling success. These conditions are
 just the conditions to carry germs and
 microbes like wild fire from one end of the coast of New England to the other. Very wise people are already packing and starting for the White Mountains, for Lenox, and above all for the salu- brious heights of Litchfield
 FERNANDEZ. 
 She-T don't believe thara u,oe o b4