384 Insurance and Gambling. [CHAP. xv. 



habits which alone insure prosperity in the long run, diver 

 sion of wealth into dishonest hands, &c., have endeavoured 

 to demonstrate the necessary loss caused by the practice. 



12. These attempts may be divided into two classes. 

 There are (1) those which appeal to merely numerical con 

 siderations, and (2) those which introduce what is called the 

 moral as distinguished from the mathematical value of a 

 future contingency. 



(1) For instance, an ingenious attempt has been made 

 by Mr Whitworth to prove that gambling is necessarily 

 disadvantageous on purely mathematical grounds. 



When two persons play against each other one of the two 

 must be ruined sooner or later, even though the game be a 

 fair one, supposing that they go on playing long enough; the 

 one with the smaller income having of course the worst 

 chance of being the lucky survivor. If one of them has a 

 finite, and the other an infinite income, it must clearly be 

 the former who will be the ultimate sufferer if they go on 

 long enough. It is then maintained that this is in fact every 

 individual gambler s position, &quot;no one is restricted to gamb 

 ling with one single opponent; the speculator deals with the 

 public at large, with a world whose resources are practically 

 unlimited. There is a prospect that his operations may 

 terminate to his own disadvantage, through his having no 

 thing more to stake ; but there is no prospect that it will 

 terminate to his advantage through the exhaustion of the 

 resources of the world. Every one who gambles is carrying 

 on an unequal warfare: he is ranged with a restricted capital 

 against an adversary whose means are infinite 1 .&quot; 



In the above argument it is surely overlooked that the 

 adversaries against whom he plays are not one body with a 

 common purse, like the bank in a gambling establishment. 



1 Choice and Chance, Ed. n. p. 208. 



