INTEMPERANCE AND IMBECILITY.

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of untried virtue, scoff at the fallen of any quality, one hardly knows which to pity most, the vanquished fighter of life's battle, or the pharisee, proud in in being so unlike these publicans.

How the big, blustering coward is sometimes deceived by the slender form, and modest demeanor, and thin, pale face which often cover firmness and true courage! Yet the closer observer sees in the eye, and mouth, and features, lineaments as plainly indicative of character as lines chiseled by the sculpter's graver.

Once there was a half-drunken Irishman at Foster's bar who attempted to force a small, sickly-looking youth to drink. Seizing the boy by the arm, he dragged him to the counter where a glass stood ready.

"Drink that or I'll murder you," said the Irishman. "I will not," calmly replied the boy, not a trace of color appearing in his face.

"Then, damn you, you shall clear out!" exclaimed the infuriated Irishman, and taking the boy by the collar of his shirt he kicked him into the street. The youth caught the awning-post with his left arm and continued to swing round it, boy-like. His right hand he put behind him.

"You dare not follow me out," said he, in the same low, passionless voice which had characterized his whole conversation. Instantly the Irishman made a spring at him. The boy swung himself once or twice round the post to gather force; then as he came round he sprang upon his burly foe and drove a long, sharp, double-edged knife into his breast killing him instantly. The boy was tried and acquitted.

Rum has ruined its thousands, is still ruining them. War with all its horrors, pestilence, and famine are harmless as compared with the deadly work of the demon drink. A five years' war four times every century, each as disastrous to life as was that for the Union, would not kill as many men as excessive drinking now is killing every day. Dead they are,

though their vile breath has not yet left the body, and though their staggerings betoken corporeal animation.

"I have bought my ticket through," said a poor heart-broken wretch as he stood upon the wharf in conversation with a friend while waiting the departure of the steamer. He was a young man, not yet thirty, tall, well built, and intellectual, but his dress betokened poverty. Broken sentences came through quivering lips; despair was pictured in his face, and in his eyes stood moisture wrung by misfortune from the heart. "I have bought my ticket through," he said, "but I shall not go home. Seven years I have spent in California, and all that time I have drunk to excess. What is home to me now-home without hope? Doubtless I shall join Walker, in Nicaragua; I care not what becomes of me!" So have sunk from sight a hundred thousand and more of the immigration of the first decade.

CHAPTER XXIII.

GAMBLING.

Credo. I believe in dice;

Without a penny for the price,
Full often have they got me meat,
Good wine to drink and friends to treat;
And sometimes, too, when luck went worse,
They've stripped me clean of robe and purse.

-Rutefeuf.

There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err; earth in itself
Contains at once the evil and the cure;
And all-sufficing nature can chastise

Those who transgress her law-she only knows
How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits.

-Shelley.

Johnson. Depend upon it, sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by gaming? You will not find six instances in an age. There is a strange rout made about deep play, whereas you have many more people ruined by adventurous trade, and yet we do not hear such an outcry against it.

Thrale. There may be few absolutely ruined by deep play, but very many are much hurt in their circumstances by it.

Johnson. Yes, sir, and so are very many by other kinds of expense.

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Johnson. It is not roguery to play with a man who is ignorant of the game while you are master of it, and so win his money, for he thinks he can play better than you, as you think you can play better than he, and the superior skill carries it.

Erskine. He is a fool, but you are not a rogue.
Johnson. That's much about the truth, sir.

It must be considered that

a man who only does what every one of the society to which he belongs would do, is not a dishonest man.

Boswell. So, then, sir, you do not think ill of a man who wins, perhaps, forty thousand pounds in a winter?

Johnson. Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man, but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.

-Boswell's Johnson.

A PRIMARY principle of ethics is that every individual may freely act his pleasure as long as he does not interfere with the rights of others. He may claim for himself every gratification which does not

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limit others in their gratifications. He may come and go, he may buy and sell, he may marry, preach, or develop a mine, and in all this legitimately better his condition, provided he does not make worse the condition of those, or any of them, with whom he comes in contact.

The true theory of business is that traffic which does not result in reciprocal advantages to buyer and seller is illegitimate, or at least abnormal. Let it be registered in men's minds that he who accumulates wealth to the loss of another is a bad man following a bad business. He is a swindler, and should be punished as one.

In this way men may build railroads; but they must not employ the power thus acquired in impositions upon the people, subsidizing competition to keep up iniquitous prices, buying legislators, and corrupting morals and society, building up or ruining this man or that town or industry, and exercising a hateful tyranny over a long-suffering and pusillanimous people. Men may buy and sell wheat, but they may not so 'corner' it as by their trickery to make consumers pay twice or thrice its value. Men may in good faith develop mines; but the manipulation of mining stocks as practised by brokers and bonanza chiefs is worse than ordinary gambling and stealingbeing more on a par with three-card monte, and like cheating and confidence games.

We all know the evils of gambling; how it dissatisfies society in its daily occupations, absorbs thought, dissipates energy, and renders men unfit for that steady application and reasonable economy which alone make a community prosperous. It destroys the finer qualities both of mind and feeling; it makes men moody and nervous, makes them live a life of extremes, now exhilarated by success, now despondent through failure. What folly! Some play for money, but with the percentage against them they should know that in the end they are sure to lose. Some

FOR PROFIT OR PLEASURE.

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play for pleasure; but if they ponder for a moment they must know that like drink it is but a pleasure that is sure to end in pain.

Epicurus denounced all pleasures productive of pain. No one has the moral right to obtain money or pleasure in any manner detrimental to public well-being. "This kind of action," says Herbert Spencer, "is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, cultivates a hard egotism, and so produces a general deterioration of character and conduct." All moral occupations imply the rendering of an equivalent for money received.

Is not society here, as in other cases, such as polygamy, prostitution, monopoly, and mongolianism, inclined to carry the sentiment against the professional gambling game to an extreme? Why go so far out of our way to play the prude or hypocrite? Unquestionably there are honest gamblers and dishonest gamblers. There are professional gamblers who will wax cards or use an imperfect pack, or cheat in a variety of ways, just as a shop-keeper will sell you an inferior article, overcharge, or otherwise take undue advantage; there are gamblers and shop-keepers who will not do these things. It is safe to assert that as a rule there is proportionately no more cheating and overreaching in the clubrooms of our cities than in the stock boards of our cities, or in very many of the avenues of commerce. It is safe to assert that there is more iniquity committed, more political, commercial, and social demoralization perpetrated by the monopolists of the United States in one day than is achieved by all the gamblers, prostitutes, and polygamists in a twelve-month.

Since very early times gambling has been held infamous by most civilized nations. Aristotle declared a gamester to be no better than a thief. Stringent laws against games of hazard, except during the Saturnalia, were passed by the Roman senate; nevertheless the people played. Jews, Mahometans, and