Gambling among women of fashion was more a result of too much leisure and too little intellectual stimulus than an indication of vicious propensities. _The Female Spectator_, from which we have quoted, in an article in 1745, relating an account of the visit of a country lady to a London friend, furnishes an illustration of the extent and effects of the vice. The article recites that after knocking a considerable time at the door of her friend's house,--the hour was between eleven and twelve o'clock in the day,--a footman, with his nightcap on and a general appearance of having risen from the dead, responded to her inquiry for her friend, in the interim of his yawns: "We had a racquet here last night, and my lady cannot possibly be stirring these three hours." The surprised visitor refrained from asking any questions concerning this unintelligible answer, and, after leaving her name, returned again at three o'clock. She had the good fortune to be admitted, and found her friend at her chocolate. She had a dish of this in one hand, and with the other she seemed to have been busy in sorting a large pile of guineas, which she had divided in two heaps on the table before her. Rising, she greeted her visitor with great civility, and expressed regret at the latter's disappointment on first calling, saying, with a smile, that when her friend had been a little longer in town, she would lie longer in bed in the morning. She then enlightened her as to the term "racquet," telling her that when the number assembled for cards exceeded ten tables the game was so styled; if fewer, it was called a "rout"; and if there were but two tables, it was a "drum."
It must always appear a curious and an unfortunate circumstance that at the time of the great industrial awakening in England in the last half of the eighteenth century, when men, women, and children were losing their individuality and becoming mere industrial units, representing so many pounds of human energy to be added to a machine, the women and children of the factories and of the hovels of the factory towns cried piteously to the Church for bread and received but a stone. And this was at a time when the social needs were so great and the sympathies of all other classes seemed to be alienated by diversity of interest from those who were called upon to toil for the making of England's wealth. Professor Thorold Rogers, the painstaking and acute investigator of England's industry, says with regard to the lethargy which constituted a veritable Dark Age for the English Church: "It is hard indeed to see what there is to relieve the darkness of the picture which the Anglican Church presents from the death of Queen Anne to the time of the Evangelical Revival. Over against the Anglican Church, formal, jealous of laymen, fearful of schism or irregularity, should be set the nonconformist churches." Although there was a great deal of religious enthusiasm in the religious communities of the Commonwealth, the principal branches of the Protestant nonconformists soon became wedded to their own systems, and, in a way, as narrow in their application of the principles of the New Testament as the church from which they had separated. It was not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that a movement began which opened the way to lines of development which have been going on ever since. The vast number of present-day religious societies, whether in direct connection with the Church or outside of its pale, may be traced in some ways to the period just before and during the reign of William III.