GAMBLING.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XII, Issue 241, 25 September 1922, Page 7

GAMBLING.

i VIEWS OF AUSTRALIAN ARCHBISHOP. i AUSTRALIA AND THE TOTALISATOR. The discussion in the House of Representatives on Wednesday on gambling in general, and the tote and bookmaker in particular, as reported in yesterday’s issue, arouses additional interest in a qu?stion which is constantly be- • fore the public. The following report of a sermon, preached I by Archbishop Lees at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, is taken from j the Melbourne “Argus” of recent date. The Archbishop adopted for his text “Righteousness in PublicLife,” and made special reference to the attempt to legalise the totalisa- | tor as an aid to gambling in the { Commonwealth. Needless to say, he took the same side of the argument as that taken by the member for Christchurch North on Wednesday. “It is urged that no sportsman can be found among the opposition,” said the Archbishop. “It is curious how men can persistely confound business with dishonesty. Yet every commercial • man will tell you they do. And just so. men habitually confound gambling j with sport. . And while many are not - inclined to concern themselves about I the particular ethics of small wagers, the social recklessness, for instance, of throwing away £25,000,000 in one year, in one State alone, is unpardonable in the present financial shortage of the world ; yet New South Wales did this recently. Men who can fling away in such mad fashion the means of livelihood and relief have certainly no right to complain of taxation. It is obvious that they have more money than they know what to do with. What can we say in face of) the fact that every State into which the totalisator has been introduced shows a continual and rapid increase in the sums spent on gambling by this as well as other means. Is it not true that in one State the very introducer of the bill publicly repented within three years of the floodgates he had innocently opened? But the stewardship of money is one of the most sacred of social responsibilities. I know that the gambler often has a poor home, poverty-stricken through his blame. If he has a rich home, still, in God’s eyes his money is a trust, and such it is in the eyes of the State. It is not a question which you will have, the totalisator or the bookmaker, but of setting a standard of decent Christian and social handling of the commodity of which the world at/ present stands in the greatest nbed. “It is urged that you cannot suppress gambling, and that the revenue would be very valuable. It was scarcely anywhere denied in the argument about the totalisator that the present conduct of the bookmaking profession was an unmitigated evil. I. of course, express no view on the individual. The very best men, in arguing for the totalisator. continually give away thu bookmaker; and the completeness of their unanimity is not only a condemnation. it is a challenge. I altogether deny the right of any man to say that this is an attitude which is unsporting. On the contrary, no one denies that the element with ruins sport, spoils sport ,tarnishes sport is this very thing. Owners who habitually bet here join hands emphatically with folk who never gamble. No community can sit down and surrender on a confessed evil without decaying and deserving to decay. If you know a thing is evil, fight it. You say you cannot abolish it, but you can at least try. You say you will never stamp it out; you can at least seek to get the fire under, and you can refrain from throwing matches about. You may not be able to get rid of infectious diseases ; but at least you are always exercising a repressive policy. You make no truce with smallpox, or plague; will you surrender to uncleanness in sport? Here is a call to Christian sportsmanship. in which I lor one, believe. “There’s money in it, we are told.” continued Archbishop Lees. “So there is in the traffic of slaves, so there is in sweating, so there is in the financing of houses of ill-fame, so there is in the illicit gin traffic on the African coast and in the islands. But we don’t talk about it, and don’t encourage it, nay. we do our best to punish the trafficker*. \Ve don’t want our public roads made smooth with the reckless waste of the means of life. Our feet will he blistered nationally if we tread that road. We don’t want hospitals sustained out of the blood of the ruined gambler, and the hunger of neglected children, and the tears of unhappy wives. A man is no ‘wowser’ or spoil-sport it he burns with an honest indignation when he is asked to lend his support to a thing which is morally wrong. We want this sunny Australia of ours to be God’s own country in every deed, where, as the old preacher Zechariah said, even the harness of the horses has ‘Holiness to the Lord’ engraved on it.”