THE GAMBLER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 13948, 2 January 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE GAMBLER.

SOME OF HIS CHARACTERISTICS. Bagshot appears to have visited Mont* Carlo in the winter of the year 1902, and I find sundry observations in his note-books, which may be traced to this visit. " Gambling and .superstition," he writes, "go hand in hand, and both result from the Inexpungable human instinct to escape from the rational. In this place everything ".hat; is absurd 's greedily believed. You acquire luck by touching a dwarf,' by picking up n pin, by wearing charms, by not seeing .tbs moon through glass, by seeing two .-nag' r pies or three pigeons. You are in a,world where two and two have ceased to makf. four, and may make a hundred or nothing. That is obviously the charm of it to men and women in revolt against the 'horridroutine .of causa and effect. There is IS.— • temperate, frugal, Businesslike, and sternly rational, for 50 weeks in the year, yet for the remaining fortnight recklessly staki ing forty-pound notes on the spin of ih<t roulette ball or the fall of the Cards! TJ is his reaction, against the deadly sanity ol ; Lombard-street. ; All men are said to cra.v<i* a nerve-poison—' ; ;!','' -■■■'..' ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, OR drugs, ~ and nearly all men seem' at one time, oj another to need a brain-poison— narcotic of the reasoning faculty-— it ia the function of this place to supply. ' But then the reasoning faculty has a habit of reasserting itself while the narcotic" is at work. If the gambler would only accept this irrational world on its own' terms, little harm would come to him. But he must proceed to supply it with a 'ogio which belongs to the sane world, a.nd herein lies his disaster. " F., who is in all'othej respects a rational man, seriously believe while he is in this place that one spin o* the roulette ball, influences another spin c) the roulette ball, and one deal of the cards, ANOTHER DEAL OF THE CARDS. : Both beliefs are manifestly absurd, and ii. he applied them to his banking business Hot would-be ruined in a fortnight. Yet on these (absurdities he builds what he calls a " system," and " invests"' a thousand pounds. It is the nature of the place to be system-proof. You cannot have a system of the unsystematic. ' Yet its supreme cms • mug lies in its constant invitation to you to apply re-aeon to its absurdities, and in proportion as it succeeds it increases your losses and its own gains. The gambler is vain and inordinately sanguine. If he wins, it is his own cleverness; if he loses, it is his " accursed luck." What! he wins he spends, regardless of what he lost yesterday or what he may loso to-morrow. Above all things, NEVER GIVE MORAL ADVICE TO A GAMBLER, for it is part'of the perversity of this place that it will instantly rise up and defeat your best maxims. You tell him to come away; he defies you and stays, and- at the next coup wins heavily. Or he comes away, and misses a coup that would have brought him fortune, and bears you an e'tenufi grudge. There is no point in the gam© "<tl which you can say that prudence' will he rewarded or recklessness puhiolied. ' Moral? ise, if you will, about gambling in general ; but never stake your moral maxims on a particular coup (a good rule for life in general). From "The Comments of Ba,v shot," by J. K. Spender.