The evening times. [volume] (Grand Forks, N.D.) 1906-1914, 1906-09-20
ENGLISH GAMBLERS
Peers and Peeresses Conducted
Temples Of Chance and
Advertised Them.

ed and unheard OF touches on society
or any of the innumerable forms Of
public taste and predictions, skep-
ticlsm becomes almost duty. What
ever else you may forget. please re-
member that during the excavations
of Pompeii large numbers Of cogged
dice We're happened upon. There is
good deal of comfort, and host
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 English So
ciety is something peculiar to the year
1906, either in fervor, pervasiveness
or resultant harm. There may posi-
bly, be details in it that have not &C.
Cured before, and could not be par
alleled from the history, let us say.
OF the eighteenth century-the great
gambling age of English annals. II
Sc. am not aware of them. 1t is
constantly said. for instance, that the
extent to which girls and young mar
ried women gamble nowadays at
bridge is entirely novel: but in the
files of the Times for 1897 you will
find this Illuminating paragraph: AT
some of our first boarding schools the
fair pupils are now taught whist and
caslnO'-not, one suspects, for arts
sake alone.
Follies Of Bygone Days.
And l rather fancy that all the
other features of the bridge mania,
which are roundly denounced as un-
precedented, might, if examined. be
found to be merely reproductions of
bygone follies. An impartial judg-
ment would probably so no further
than to say that gambling in English
society has now scaled a height I'M
reached since the most rollicking days
OF the latter eighteenth and the earlier
nineteenth century. that it is certain
ly more widespread today than it has
been for the last seventy years, and
that, while individual losses are less
sensational than they used to be, the
proportion OF gamblers to population
was never at any time greater than
at this moment.
In small nonessentials there has,
OF course. been certain change A
hundred years ago more than one
peerless kept gambling shops openly,
and advertised them as such. Today
1t would be more correct to say that,
though many titled woman's house is
a gambling shop in substance and
practice, the fact is not advertised.
Shortly before Queen Victoria came
to the throne. Crackford's, on st.
James street, now the home of the
Devonshire club. was the gambling
center of the metropolis, and as much
as million sterling was known to
change hands in single evening. I
do not think that anything like that
would be possible now Gibbons tells
us how he watched Fox lose $50 an
hour for twenty-five hours on end.
That, too. one may fairly class among
the incidents of an age that has passed.
Ladies Heavy Plungers.
In one of his letters to Horace Mann,
Walpole makes the astonishing state
ment that a loss of 100000 at a
single sitting was not rare enough to
be surprising. 1t would certainly Gre
ate some talk nowadays. One of Brad
docks sisters gambled away her whole
fortune of e12,O0O in month. Ladies
are luckier today in getting some one
TO help them out of such predicaments.
There is well-known tale of four
men who sat down to whist at Rag
gett's club one Monday evening, about
1920. and did not rise till II O'Clock on
the following Wednesday morning one
OF them being the richer by 100000.
l have not heard of such herculean
feats being performed today, and, in
deed, one has only to look at the bet
ting 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-
latners-and its great-grandmother
society lives to gamble, and a consid-
cradle section of it CANDLES to live.
The reign of bridge for the moment is
supreme and autocratic. But in other
days roulette had its innings, and bac-
carat. and poker, and whist.
Fair Sex Played Faro.
The ladies of the regency stayed in
doors all day, with the blinds drawn,
playing faro. The ladies of King Ed
wards reign are not behind them in
their devotion to bridge, but who shall
say they are ahead of them? When you
near anyone complaining that he is a
social outcast because he cannot play
bridge; that house parties are ar
ranged simply with view to bridge:
that it is spelling dinners and week
end shooting parties, running hunts.
and turning billiard rooms into des-
erts; that the young married women
refuse to dance any longer, they leave
IL to the girls, who in their turn try
and hand it over to the children
and all because of bridge; when you
hear such complaints as these, be sure
you are listening to lamentation as
old as the hills.
No one cares very much to what ex-
tent men gamble. 1t is the women
gamblers who provide the moralist
with his text. Women rarely Dlay
well, and they are almost invariably
bad losers A woman who reached
the masculine average could easily
dress herself on her winnings so long
as she had the sense to play only with
other men. Few of them have, and
the consequences, when woman owes
man money. are often calamittous. A
good many men, perhaps not the least
wise in their generation, refuse to
play with women at ALL If that rule
became universal it would probably be
TO the advantage of both sexes. AS
it is, the only people who benefit by
the 1rrupti0n of women into the card
room are the pawnbrokers and jewel
ers,-just as it was 100 years ago, and
Just as it will be 100 years hence
London Chronicle.