Scarcely less obvious and direct is the connection between this vice and intemperance. If the drunkard is not always a gamester, the gamester is almost without exception intemperate. There is for the most part a union of the three--horrible as the alliance may be--I mean gambling, intemperance, and debauchery.
There is even a species of intoxication attendant on gambling. _Rede_, in speaking of one form of this vice which prevails in Europe, says; 'It is, in fact, a PROMPT MURDERER; irregular as all other games of hazard--rapid as lightning in its movements--its strokes succeed each other with an activity that redoubles the ardor of the player's blood, and often deprives him of the advantage of reflection. In fact, a man after half an hour's play, who for the whole night may not have taken any thing stronger than water, has all the appearance of drunkenness.' And who has not seen the flushed cheek and the red eye, produced simply by the excitement of an ordinary gaming table?
It is an additional proof of the evil of gaming that every person devoted to it, _feels_ it to be an evil. Why then does he not refrain? Because he has sold himself a slave to the deadly habit, as effectually as the drunkard to his cups.
Burgh, in his Dignity of Human Nature, sums up the evils of this practice in a single paragraph:
'Gaming is an amusement wholly unworthy of rational beings, having neither the pretence of exercising the body, of exerting ingenuity, or of giving any natural pleasure, and owing its entertainment wholly to an unnatural and vitiated taste;--the cause of infinite loss of time, of enormous destruction of money, of irritating the passions, of stirring up avarice, of innumerable sneaking tricks and frauds, of encouraging idleness, of disgusting people against their proper employments, and of sinking and debasing all that is truly great and valuable in the mind.'
Let me warn you, then, my young readers,--nay, more, let me _urge_ you never to enter this dreadful road. Shun it as you would the road to destruction. Take not the first step,--the moment you do, all may be lost. Say not that you can command yourselves, and can stop when you approach the confines of danger. So thousands have thought as sincerely as yourselves--and yet they fell. 'The probabilities that we shall fall where so many have fallen,' says Dr. Dwight, 'are millions to one; and the contrary opinion is only the dream of lunacy.'