ODDS AND ENDS. 



DOOM OF THE GREATEST GAMBL- 

 ING CITY ON EARTH. 



Shrewd and thrifty and sporty King 

 Leopold of Belgium has seen somewhat 

 the same sort of handwriting on the wall 

 that Belshazzar saw. He personally may 

 not have been weighed in the balance and 

 found wanting, but the great gambling 

 tables in Belgium have been, and a frac- 

 tion of every franc bet thereon in Ostend 

 at least ultimately found its roundabout 

 way into the King's deep pockets. 



Belgium has come to the conclusion, 

 a r tir long and rather bitter experience, 

 that gamling tables pay no one except the 

 proprietor. Hence, the passage of a 

 stringent law that is of more public inter- 

 est .than has generally been supposed, for 

 it means that the greatest gambling hell of 

 our generation has come to the end of its 

 rope, and that one of the most prosperoua 

 cities in Europe is in danger of collapse. 



One usually thinks first of Monte Carlo 

 in connection with continental gambling, 

 but as a matter of fact the beautiful 

 Riviera resort has been, for the last few 

 years, only an amateur beside Ostend and 

 Spa. It was mostly a show place where 

 the passing tourist risked from five to a 

 hundred dollars for the fun of the thing, 

 or where an occasional millionaire droppe 1 

 a few thousand dollars and forgot to men- 

 tion it, or won an equal sum and was 

 heralded as the man who never could lose. 

 Ostend was different. The gamblers 

 made more of a business of it there, and 

 last season the total sums changing hands 

 over the green cloth at Ostend aud Spa 

 were perhaps double the amounts distrib- 

 uted by the Monte Carlo croupiers. Like- 

 wise the average amount of the bets at 



average. 



In the last season, only three months 

 long, the tables at Ostend alone made a 

 net profit of $1,400,000, after turning over 

 to the municipality a third of a million in 

 taxes. On top of that each club found it 

 profitable to pay out of its own pocket $16 

 of each initiate's fee of $20. Ostend was 

 the real gambling center of the world. 



The story of gambling in Ostend is sig- 

 nificant, and every American municipality 

 could study it to its own benefit. A few 

 years ago any one could leave London at 

 night and be busy losing his sovereigns 

 the next morning on almost any corner of 

 Ostend, at any kind of a game of chance, 

 without the slightest let or hindrance. 

 Ostend and Spa did not object to that at 

 all, but when the rich men's sons at home 

 began to squander their patrimony at the 

 local tables, when Belgium society women 

 lost their own and their children's for- 

 tunes, when suicides and forgeries grow- 

 ing out of losses at gaming became startl- 

 ingly frequent, parliament rose in its vir- 

 tue and passed a law closing all the small 

 dens, and permitting only strangers to 

 lose their money in the big clubs. 



Thereafter, no resident of Ostend might 

 gamble in any Ostend clubs. He had to 

 go to Spa or Namur for his sport and be 

 enrolled as a stranger. Any visitor to Os- 

 tend who wanted to try his luck had to go 

 through the formality of joining a club. If, 

 however, he happened to be a guest at one 

 of the leading hotels controlled by the 

 "Compagnie des Grands Hotels," in which 

 King Leopold is heavily interested, his 

 application could be rushed through in a 

 night, and could be seated at rouge et no] r 



