The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-09-17
From the London Chronicle.

From tho London Chronicle.
 = IsTORY will parallel most things Nl especially if the things are not
 what they should be- It is one of the soundest rules of life to withhold ones confidence from the man who has discov- cred a new evil When the evil which he believes to be unprecedented and unheard of touches on society or on any of the innumerable forms of public taste and predllections, skepticism becomes almost duty. Whatever else you may forget, please remember that during the exca- vations of Pompeii large numbers of eogged dice were happened upon. There is a good deal of comfort, and most salutary moral, in that fact.
 So that cannot in the least agree with Father Vaughan when he tries to make out that the gambling mania which is sweeping over England society is some thing peculiar to the year 1908, either in fervor, pervasiveness, or resultant harm. There may possibly be details in 1t that have not occurred before, and could not be paraleled from the history, let us say, of the eighteenth century-the great gamb- ling age of English annals If so. I am not aware of them. It Is constantly said, for instance, that the extent to which girls and young married women gamble nowadays at bridge is entirely novel; but in the files of the Times for 17s7 you will find this Illuminating paragraph: At cAhA fair pupils are now taught whist and casino"-not, one suspects, for arts sake alone
 And I rather fancy that all the other features of the bridge mania, which are roundly denounced as unprecedented, might if examined, be found to be merely reproductions of bygone follies. An im- partial judgment would probably go no further than to say that gambling in Eng fish society has now sealed height un- reached since the most rollicking days of the latter eighteenth and the earlier nine teenth century that 1t is certainly more widepread today than 1t has been for the last seventy years. and that while ind- vldual losses are less sensational than
 
 ling to population was never at any time greater than at this moment.
 In small nonessentials there has of course, been a certain change. A hundred years ago more than one pceress kept gambling shops openly, and advertised them as such. Today it would be more correct to say that, though many a titled woman's house is a gambling shop in sub stance and practice, the fact Is not adver- tised. Shortly before Queen Victoria came to the throne Croclsford's, on St. James street, now the home of the Devonshire club, was the gambling center of the met ropols, and as much as 100000 sterling was known to change hands in a single evening" I do not think that anything like that would be possible now. Gibbon tells us how he watched Fox lose $500 an hour for twenty-two hours on end. That, ! too, one many fairly class among the | incidents of an age that has passed
 In one of his letters to Horace Mann, 1 Walpole makes thesastounding statement that a loss of e1o0,0O0 at single sitting | was not rare enough to be surprising It l would certainly create some talk powa- i days One of the Braddock sisters gam l bled away her whole fortune of e12,000 in i month Ladies are luckier today in | getting some one to help them out of such predicaments. There is a well known tale i of four men who sat down to whist at | Raggetts club one Monday evening" about i 1920 and did not rise till Il o'clock on the ] following Wednesday morning. one of 1 them being the richer by e9O.oo0. I bave | not heard of such herculean feats being | performed today, and. indeed, one has | only to look at the betting book of | Brooks to realize that the age of heroic | plungers is dead.
 For the rest, England is simply living | over again the life of its great-grand | it's great-grandmothcrs. So- | ciety lives to gamble, and considerable | section of 1t gambles to live. The reign | of bridge for the moment is supreme and autocratic. But in other days roulette