BETTINa. 209 



The result of this sort of legislation is to make it 

 in efiPect more difl&cult for people of a lower class to 

 indulge in either making bets, or consuming drink, 

 than those of a higher, as the richer and higher 

 classes find it more easy to comply with the vexatious 

 and intricate regulations than the poorer and less 

 educated, and therefore are less liable to come into 

 collision with the law. 



But enactments of this one-sided description do 

 harm, and it does not speak well for our social insti- 

 tutions that there should be in the same street a 

 club, which is really nothing more than a co-opera- 

 tive hotel, where the rich can buy wine at any hour 

 of the night and throughout the whole day on 

 Sunday, and side by side with it a house into which 

 the poorer citizen is debarred by Act of Parliament 

 from entering, except at stated hours. While it 

 is a blot on our domestic legislation to see in 

 one column of a newspaper the current odds at 

 Tattersall's quoted, \7ith the amount of betting 

 transactions recorded, and in another column of the 

 same newspaper to read of the police having made a 

 forcible entry into a house, and having summoned 

 the inmates before the magistrates, and of their 

 being fined a large sum with the option of going to 

 prison, for being engaged in transactions of a -pre- 

 cisely similar nature. 



I will now proceed to consider the effect pro- 

 duced by the practice of wagering on the character 



p 



