About Betting and Gambling, 93 



•drag at the races, you would have plenty of fun for your 

 money, and do yourself no harm. Betting money which 

 you cannot command is certain ruin in the end ; and the 

 same remark applies to playing cards at high stakes. If 

 men who really gamble played only with notes and gold, and 

 barred I.O.U.'s and cheques, there would be less loss. I 

 have a great respect for Frith's '^ Derby Day," but I wholly 

 quarrel with his " Eoad to Ruin." Its moral is absurd, as 

 his hero would go to the dogs anyhow. In the first place 

 he is a spoilt boy at college with a great deal too much 

 money ; in his after career he is an overdressed effeminate 

 ■cad, who would have cried and called in the police if any 

 •one " put in one " between his eyes ; and in the last scenes 

 he is going to blow out — what he never had — his brains. 

 Hogarth's hero, " Jack Idle," is a much more interesting 

 character. I pity him somewhat, as the sweep with the one 

 eye began his rain by hussle-penny on a tombstone in 

 <.-hurch time, and eventually split on him. No, I don't care 

 for greedy, spoilt boys, who had no generous traits at school 

 or at college, and who are mean at heart ; but I do shed a 

 tear over fine, manly, generous young fellows, who enter 

 life full of hopes, and from a sensitive abhorrence of being 

 singular or stingy, they touch pitch and are seethed in the 

 cauldron. 



If great merchants and bankers were to make a hard and 

 fast bargain with theii* emjyloyes, that in the event of their 

 ^oing into a billiard-room within three miles of their place 

 ■of business, or playing cards or betting in any public place, 

 their engagements would terminate at once, they would do 

 ^i great kindness to many young men, and real good for 

 themselves, as young men who wanted promotion elsewhere 

 would take a character with them from the fact of their 

 having been in such a firm. 



It is useless reminding heads of schools that potdiunting 



