Gambling.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 2715, 30 January 1892, Page 3

Gambling.

IT PREDISPOSES THOSE WHO ENGAGE IN IT TO COMMIT SUICIDE. “If we could but obtain accurate statistics we should find that gambling was of all vicious habits, not even excluding hard drinking, the one which most predisposed its victims to suicide. Yet,” continues the writer, “ one does not quite see at first why gambling should so greatly predispose to suicide. The gambler prima facie ought to be a man trained by his life to bear ill luck with fortitude.” This, of course, is true only if there be nothing in the very conditions of his life secretly disintegrating that fortitude. Let us see. It is probable that an intelligent jury will always account for the gambler’s suicide by supposing that, ere he consummated the awful deed, he had come under the resistless control of temporary insanity. Hence we must try to discover those facts in the gambler’s inward history which lead to this insanity. I believe they are of two classes, according as we study his experience in the light of ethical or of psychological and physiological laws. In the region of moral consciousness I do not think we need seek far for the cause of the insanity. The loss of the man’s whole possessions by gambling must work upon him like a sudden accident upon a drunken man—it awakens him. And now as he looks at the result of his career, at the obligations he has ignored, the relatives he has wronged, even the riches he has lost in pursuit of the gambler’s passion, only one word can rise to his mind, and that is “ Fool !” As he glances around, the men with whom he has been gambling look at him in pity and mutter “Poor fellow!” or “ Poor fool !” the very servants who have watched his ruin gaze at one poorer than they, and call him in their hearts “ Poor fool ”

I believe that this word of scorn, echoing within and without, filling the atmosphere for that man’s ear, accurately describes the shame which he feels. Ashamed, crushed, ruined, despised by his associates who need him no longer, and called to no new and congenial surroundings by any human voice, the wonder is not that so many become insane, but that every ruined gambler is not drawn in the hour of his awakening into the terrible vortex of insanity. The man who loses his all in a legitimate commercial undertaking retains at least his self-respect, and self-respect is the soul of fortitude.— The Contemporary Review.