The strain of gambling is a sharp one. It breaks the nerves and prematurely ages the face. Losses, if they do not paralyze the mind, at least enrage it against circumstances and events, turning the man to a veritable horned beast, or to a poisonous serpent, bent on inflicting a blow though it be on its own body. The natives of India call this passion “hot heart,” or inner rage without vent. The revulsion has been severe to the extent of our conception. Fortune was near, nor is it far. The loser feels that fate is a sentient being—a hag whom he must tear with his nails. Her blow has been twice as harsh as if he had not hoped, and it falls on one ill-prepared to receive it. There lies but one escape, and that is death. Hence the excitement with which professional gamblers behold the loss of their means of livelihood. Where suicide does not follow, the most painful blows are often delivered by the gambler upon his own temples and forehead. He has no pity on himself for losing money that he ought to have kept.
Gambling is closely allied with forces which tend to the subversion of social order; it is directly conducive to various crimes of frequent occurrence. The gambling mania is at war with industry, and therefore, destructive of prosperity and thrift. Devotion to the gaming habit will in time hush the voice of conscience and is a constant menace to honor and happiness. Once possessed of the passion, an individual is lost to every sense of duty as husband, father, citizen, and man of business. His heart becomes the prey of emotions at enmity with affection and sound morality. In this condition, a man is unfitted for any responsibility requisite to the welfare of society. In spirit, if not in fact, he is an Ishmaelite—an outlaw; then, expediency is his only principle, and necessity his only law. In heart, at least, he is a criminal. As a result, the man is false to every confidence, recreant to every trust! Is this not true? Look about you and see! How many bloody tragedies are directly traceable to the gambling “hell?” How has this vice fed the mania for homicide, the tendency to suicide? The business world is rife with forgeries and defalcations, which may be directly ascribed to gambling. Widows and orphans are plundered by their trustees, corporations wrecked by their officers, one partner made the victim of another, the employer betrayed by his employee, all because of this terrible passion. But is this the end? Is it even the worst? In gambling, as in other forms of evil, are not the “sins of the father visited upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation.” It would seem so, if Dr. Ribot is an authority. Descending from sire to son, from ancestor to posterity, the vice enters into the very _fiber of the soul_. Ribot asserts of gambling, as of avarice, theft and murder, that the propensity is subject to the law of heredity; that the “passion for play often attains such a pitch of madness as to be a form of insanity, and like it transmissible.” And Da Gama Machado says: “A lady of my acquaintance, and who possessed a large fortune, had a passion for gambling, and passed whole nights at play. She died young of pulmonary disease. Her eldest son, who was very like his mother, had the same passion for play. He, too, like his mother, died of consumption, and at about the same age. His daughter, who resembled him, inherited the same taste, and died young.” Justified twice over, then, is society, in protecting itself against a practice so terrible, so deadly, so far reaching in its effects.