LEGALISED GAMBLING

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 3, 3 July 1926, Page 12

LEGALISED GAMBLING

ITS EFFECT IN THE DOMINION.

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

LONDON, Sth May.

The "Keighley News" (Yorkshire) publishes some views of a Yorkshireman, now long resident in the Dominion, on the British Government's proposal to legalise betting. In Now Zealand the totalisator system is in full blast, but he hopes it will never come to pass in England. "I don't bet myself," he writes, "but betting is so common in this country that it is thought to be quite respectable, and it is alarming to find such a vast majority who believe in getting something for nothing. Why, only to-day, early in the morning, I called to pay a contractor a small account, and, to my surprise, found he was in bed. After a while he came into the room and told mo they were having a holiday, as his men wanted to attond a trotting race. "Also what are known as 'art unions' are very common —another name for a high-class lottery. . . _. The most serious aspect of this question is the almost general desire to get something for nothing. Land and other property are about twice the price they ought to be; labour is the same; and the only thought seems to be ' screw it out of them.' " Eeferring to a description in a London newspaper of New Zealand as a " terrestrial • paradise," the ex-York-shireman grants that unemployment is not much in evidence. "In a country almost as large as Great Britain and Ireland, with a population of 1,300,000, it ought not to be. . . . It would be a poor do if 1,300,----000 couldn't live decently in it, especially when it is defended for next to nothing by the British Navy. All the same, it is head over heels in debt, and most people have either borrowed a lot of money or are trying to. And still the Government keeps coming to that poor old country, which pays its way, lends money to other countries, and sends £34,000,000 in gold across the Atlantic every year. You may not know that until twelve months ago there had been a moratorium for ten years at a stretch; otherwise thousands would never have been able to meet their obligations. In other words, those who lent their money had to wait.'' 85, Fleet street. •