ANTI-GAMBLING CRUSADE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13278, 10 September 1906, Page 6

ANTI-GAMBLING CRUSADE.

THE GOVERNMENT AND THE • TOTALISATOR.

ATTACK ON THE TOTALISATOR. PROPOSED REDUCTION OF PERMITS. [BY IECEOBAjn.—SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.] Wellington, Saturday. In connection with the division on his Totalisator Bill, . Mr. Ell says that the closeness of the numbers indicates the highwater mark for some years of the popular feeling against the machine. The amendment favouring the reduction of permits was lost only by six votes, and Messrs. McLachlan and Flatman, who, it is said, would have favoured this amendment, were not in the House when the division was* taken. Mr. Tanner's Bill for the limitation of totalisator permits, of which notice was given immediately after the rejection of Mr. Ell's Bill, aims at the reduction of the present number of permits by one-third. A similar reduction was carried in 1894, when Sir Robert Stout introduced a measure to that effect. Mr. Tanner considers it is futile aft present to attempt to secure the abolition of the machine, but there is, he considers, a sufficiently strong feeling in the House in favour of a reduction of permits to give tho Bill a chance of becoming law if it goes to the vote. VIEWS OF COUNCIL OF THE CHURCHES. [BY TELEGRAPH. —PRESS ASSOCIATION.] Wellington, Saturday. The Council of the Evangelical Churches has arranged to wait on tho Premier on Monday morning on the subject of gambling. The deputation will urge on the Government(l) The abolition of the totalisator, on the ground that it gives State sanction and respectability to vice, and has enormously increased the area of gambling; (2) the isolation of racecourses from telegraphic and telephonic communication, which will tend to restrict gambling to the actual course where the races are being held; '3) rendering illegal the publication of betting news and results in the daily papers. DEMONSTRATION AT DUNEDIN. . ' j SPEECH BY MR. JUSTICE COOPER. [by telegraph. — press ASSOCIATION.] Dcnedin, Sunday. I The men's afternoon meeting in connection with the Methodist Central Mission took tho form of an anti-gambling demonstration. Air. Justice Cooper presided, a.nd speakers wero the Rev. Dr. Nisbet (of the First Church), and Mr. A. S. Adams, the latter denouncing Stock Exchange gambling. [BY TELEGRAPH. —own correspondent.] Dunedin, Sunday. At the anti-gambling demonstration Mr. Justice Cooper mado an incisive attack on the gambling evil. The vice, he said, was as old as nuinan nature. It was protean in its manifestations. It was to be found in the society drawingroom under the name of bridge. When in the form of fan-tan and pakapoo it was played in the Chinaman's parlour, the house was raided by the police, and the Celestials were locked up. It had invaded all games, and tainted nearly all British sport. Whether the increase of gambling in the colony, was due to the introduction of the totalisator he could not say. It was a controversial question certainly. However that was, it was within the past 25 years that the increase in gambling had become so marked. Indulgence in this vice lowered man's moral standard, and weakened his moral fibre. In this colony a very large proportion of the crimes of forgery, embezzlement, and- breaches of trust were committed by those who had become victims of the gambling habit. Our welfare was being menaced, and the tone of the community lowered by the prevalence of the gambling habit. As he had already said, gambling was as old as humanity. ' Herein lay the difficulty. They might, legislate to prohibit and penalise. They might hale Chinamen now and again, and-send a bookmaker or two occasionally to' gaol, abolish the totalisator, and pass, other restrictive measures, but thev would not destroy the evil. They would barely scotch it. So long as ' gambling was not considered immoral by the community generally, so long as it was winked at by churches, favoured in respectable form in society drawinsrrooms, looked upon as a legitimate mode of recreation, quite pardonable if not abused— Ions; would it flourish, and, hydra-headed, strike with its poison fangs, and claim its victims in every section of society. The conscience of: the people wanted aronsine; men and women should learn that gambling was anti-social, vicious, and immoral, and against the best interests of the home, the family, and the State. . REFERENCES IN AUCKLAND CHURCHES. At a number of the city and suburban churches yesterday special sermons were preached on the subject of "Betting, and Gambling,'' references being made at St. David's Church, Khyber Pass, St. James* Church, Wellington-street, the Tabernacle, St. Luke's Church, Remuera, the Onehunga Presbyterian Church, and others, the majority of the ministers forming the Council of Churches dealing with this subject, which was the common one chosen for • the annual observance of Citizen Sunday. "NO QUARTER." At St. David?s the Rev. W. Gray Dixon, preaching to a largo congregation last even-' ing, expressed satisfaction that the colonies were beginning to awaken to the danger j confronting them in the spirit of gambling; not that gambling was more flagrant in these; days than in our fathers' days, but it seemed to have spread more generally j fcbrougn the community, and even that j honor, the "'gambling woman," was be- | coming comparatively common. Gambling j had been universally condemned by thinking men in all ages, and it had, in one form or another, been declared illegal by every- civilised Government. Proceeding to consider wherein the evil of gambling essentially lay, the preacher declared there were only two conditions under which property could legitimately be exchanged— was" benevolence, which permitted at gift, and the other was that of righteousness, which regulated a business transaction ; but gambling conflicted alike with benevolence and .righteousness. The first bet corresponded to tv man's first drinking boutnot, as some might say to the first drink, for drinking of itself was not a* vice, whereas gambling, whatever its degree, was essentially a because the drunkard in a drinking bout parted with his reason, and just so did the gambler, immediately upon the act of gambling, pa,Tt with his reason. Gambling was entirely irrational, and it utterly weakened the manhood of every man who became addicted to it. The only right attitude of both State and individual to gambling was that of "no quarter," and the idea of combating gambling by licensing a form of it was sineularly irrational. No Government ever dreamed of dealing in the same way with any other vice; no Government ever '-'-d "to oppose murder bv licensing a man to kill a child, or perhirv bv licensing ai man to tell so many lice, or theft bv allowing a man to steal a certain amount of propertv, and so it was hist as ridiculous to trv to deal with the vice of •mrob'ini? bv licensing a limited amount of it through the totalisator BESETTING SIN OF AUSTRALASIAN COLONIES. The Rev. R. L. Walker, preaching in St. James' Church, said among the curses that afflicted society there was none greater than the gambling"evil. It was the besetting sin of the Australasian colonies, the blot on tho 6cutcheon of our fair fame. The merchant's operations benefited all. The workman's labour created wealth, but in gambling money was simply taken front one ; man and given to another. Neither was j benefited ; the one was sore at his loss, and j the other was demoralised by his gain. The j only difference between gambling and theft > wat, tho mutual consent of the parties to the betting transaction. Magistrates, prison governors, and ministers, whose duty took I

them among the working classes, united in testifying that there was no cause, not even drunkenness, which was productive of so much utter disintegration of character and destruction of home happiness as betting and gambling. It unsettled. the mind and unfiled for the steady prosecution ,of labour; it led to dishonesty; it brutalised, as the tragedy of the Flemmgton racecourse showed, when a mob of human fiends kicked a man to death, because he could not pay them 'their paltry shillings. Another terrible characteristic was: suicide. "If statistics," declared Mr. Walker, " could be got of the exact relation of this result to this cause, it is believed it would be simply appalling." The sad thing was that the Government, with strange inconsistency, should both punish gambling and yet encourage it by issuing permits for gambling on the largo scale by means of the totalisator. The. establishment of tho totalisator, they were told, was intended to lessen the evil, but, as any student of social ethics could have foretold, it had terribly increased it It had tended to make the vice seem respectable, and thus many unstable souls had been drawn into the vortex. All 6in was of the essence of disorder and confusion, so that it was impossible in the nature of things to regulate and limit a thing so essentially vicious as gambling.

The Rev. Joseph Clark, preaching at the Tabernacle last evening, condemned the gambling evil, which, lie said, was one of the greatest curses of the present day, and he expressed his sorrow at the Government licensing a. machine like the totalisator, which, no doubt, led to very much more gambling than would otherwise obtain. He thought it a shame that the country should profit by what meant the demoralisation of the people.