Abominations of Modern Society — Chapter 09 - The Fatal Ten-Srtike part 2
A young man in London, on coming of age, received a fortune of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and through gambling in three years was thrown on his mother for support.
An only son went to New Orleans.
He was rich, intellectual, and elegant in manners.
His parents gave him, on his departure from home, their last blessing.
The sharpers got hold of him.
They flattered him.
They lured him to the gaming-table and let him win almost every time for a good while, and patted him on the back and said, "First-rate player."
But, fully in their grasp, they fleeced him; and his thirty thousand dollars were lost.
Last of all he put up his watch and lost that.
Then he began to think of home and of his old father and mother, and wrote thus:-- "MY BELOVED PARENTS:--You will doubtless feel a momentary joy at the reception of this letter from the child of your bosom, on whom you have lavished all the favors of your declining years.
But should a feeling of joy for a moment spring up in your hearts when you shall have received this from, me, cherish it not.
I have fallen deep--never to rise.
Those gray hairs that I should have honored and protected I shall bring down with sorrow to the grave.
I will not curse my destroyer, but oh!
may God avenge the wrongs and impositions practised upon the unwary in a way that shall best please Him.
This, my dear parents, is the last letter you will ever receive from me.
I humbly pray your forgiveness.
It is my dying prayer.
Long before you shall have received this letter from me the cold grave will have closed upon me forever.
Life is to me insupportable.
I cannot, nay, I will not suffer the shame of having ruined you.
Forget and forgive is the dying prayer of your unfortunate son."
The old father came to the post-office, got the letter, and fell to the floor.
They thought he was dead at first; but they brushed back the white hair from his brow and fanned him.
He had only fainted.
I
wish he had been dead; for what is life worth to a father after his son is destroyed?
When things go wrong at a gaming-table, they shout "Foul!
foul!"
Over all the gaming-tables of the world I cry out "Foul!
foul!
Infinitely foul!"
In modern days, in addition to the other forms of gambling, have come up the thoroughly organized and, in some States, _legalized_ institution of lotteries.
There are hundreds of citizens on the way to ruin through the lottery system.
Some of the finest establishments in town are by this process being demolished, and the whole land feels the exhaustion of this accumulating evil.
The wheel of Fortune is the Juggernaut that is crushing out the life of this nation.
The records of the Insolvent Court of one city show that, in five years, two hundred thousand dollars were lost by dealing in lottery tickets.
All the officers of the celebrated Bank of the United States who failed were found to have expended the money embezzled for lottery tickets.
A man drew in a lottery fifty thousand dollars, sold his ticket for forty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and yet did not have enough to pay the charges against him for lottery tickets.
He owed the brokers forty-five thousand dollars.
An editor writes--"A man who, a few years ago, was blest with about twenty thousand dollars (lottery money), yesterday applied to us for ninepence to pay for a night's lodging."
A highly respectable gentleman drew twenty thousand dollars in a lottery; bought more tickets, and drew again; bought more--drew more largely; then rushed down headlong until he was pronounced by the select men of the village a vagabond, and his children were picked up from the street half starved and almost naked.
A hard-working machinist draws a thousand dollars; thenceforth he is disgusted with work, opens a rum grocery, is utterly debauched, and people go in his store to find him dead, close beside his rum-cask.
It would take a pen plucked from the wing of the destroying angel and dipped in blood to describe this lottery business.
A man committed suicide in New York, and upon his person was found a card of address giving a grog-shop as his boarding house, three blank lottery tickets, and a leaf from _Seneca's Morals_, containing an apology for self-murder.
One lottery in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held unlucky numbers.
There are men now, with lottery tickets in their pocket, which, if they have not sense enough to tear up or throw into the fire, will be their admission ticket at the door of the damned.
As the brazen gates swing open they will show their tickets, and pass in and pass down.
As the wheel of eternal Fortune turns slowly round, they will find that the doom of those who have despised God and imperilled their souls will be their awful prize.
God forbid that you, my reader, should ever take to yourself the lamentation of the Boston clerk, who, in eight months, had embezzled eighteen thousand dollars from his employer and expended it all in lottery tickets.
"I have for the last seven months gone fast down the broad road.
There was a time, and that but a few months since, when I was happy, because I was free from debt and care.
The moment of the first steps in my downfall was about the middle of last June, when I took a share in a company, bought lottery tickets whereby I was successful in obtaining a share of one-half of the capital prize, since which I have gone for myself.
I have lived and dragged out a miserable existence for two or three months past.
Oh, that the seven or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker, to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence.
Relatives and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such circumstances, but necessity compels.
Oh, wretch!
lottery tickets have been thy ruin.
But I cannot add more."
There are multitudes of people who disapprove of ordinary lotteries, yet have been thoroughly deceived by iniquity under a more attractive nomenclature.
The lottery in which our most highly respectable and Christian people invest is some "Art Association," or some benevolent "Gift Enterprise," in which they fondly believe there can be no harm in drawing Bierstadt's _Yosemite Valley_, or Cropsey's _American Autumn_!
At no time have lottery tickets been sown so broadcast as to-day, notwithstanding the law forbids the old-style lottery.
A few years ago our newspapers flamed with the advertisements of the Crosby Opera House scheme.
A citizen of Chicago, finding on his hands an unprofitable building, calls upon the whole country to help him out.
Rooms are opened in all the great cities.
In rush, not the abandoned and the reprobate (for _they_ like the old styles of swindling better), but the educated and refined and polished, until a host of people are in imminent peril of having thrown upon their hands a splendid Opera House.
Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars worth of tickets.
The portentous day approaches.
The rail trains from many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and Christian manner.
The throng presses in.
Hold fast your tickets, all you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the wheel begins to move.
The long agony is over.
Hundreds of thousands of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden affluence.
Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up to the house of him who owns the successful ticket.
The lightnings tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Multitudes think that there has been foul play, and that, after all, they themselves, if the truth were known, did draw the Opera House.
Ten years from now there will stand on the scaffold, or behind the prison door, or in the lonely room in which the suicide writes his farewell to wife or parents, men who will say that the first misstep of their life that put them on the wrong road was the ticket they bought in the Crosby Opera House.
The man who won that prize is already dead of his dissipations, and, strange to say, the beautiful building thus raffled away was found to be owned by its original possessor when all the excitement in regard to the matter had died away.
I care not on what street the office was, nor who were the abettors of the undertaking, nor who bought the tickets.
I pronounce the whole scheme to have been a swindle, a crime, and an insult to God and the nation.
In this class of gambler-makers I also put the "gift stores," which are becoming abundant throughout the country.
With a book, or knife, or sewing machine, or coat, or carriage there goes a _prize_.
At those stores people get something thrown in with their purchase.
It may be a gold watch or a set of silver, a ring or a farm.
Sharp way to get off unsalable goods.
It has filled the land with fictitious articles and covered up our population with brass finger-rings, and despoiled the moral sense of the community, and is fast making us a nation of gamblers.
The Church of God has not seemed willing to allow the world to have all the advantage of these games of chance.
A church fair opens, and towards the close it is found that some of the more valuable articles are unsalable.
Forthwith the conductors of the enterprise conclude that they will _raffle_ for some of the valuable articles, and, under pretence of anxiety to make their minister a present, or please some popular member of the church, fascinating persons are despatched through the room, pencil in hand, to "solicit" shares; or perhaps each draws for his own advantage, and scores of people go home with their trophies, thinking that all is right, for Christian ladies did the embroidery, and Christian men did the raffling, and the proceeds went towards a new communion set.
But you may depend on it that, as far as morality is concerned, you might as well have won by the crack of the billiard-ball or the turn of the dice-box.
Some good people cannot stand this raffling, and so, at fairs, they go to "voting," sometimes for editors, and sometimes for ministers, at a dollar a vote.
Now the Methodist minister is ahead; now the Presbyterian leads, and now the Baptist.
But, just at the last moment, when one of the ministers of the more popular sect seems sure to get the prize, the members from some obscure denomination, that do not deserve the prize, come in, and by a large contribution carry off for _their_ minister the silver tea-set.
Do you wonder that churches built, lighted, or upholstered by such processes as that come to great financial and spiritual decrepitude?
The devil says: "_I_ helped build that house of worship, and I have as much right there as you have;" and for once the devil is right.
We do not read that they had a lottery for building the church at Corinth or Antioch, or for getting up a gold-headed cane or for an embroidered surplice for Saint Paul.
All this I style ecclesiastical gambling.
More than one man who is destroyed can say that his first step on the wrong road was when he won something at a church fair.
The gambling spirit has not stopped for any indecency.
There lately transpired, in Maryland, a lottery in which people drew for lots in a burying-ground!
The modern habit of betting about everything is productive of immense mischief.
The most healthful and innocent amusements of yachting and base-ball playing have been the occasion of putting up excited and extravagant wagers.
That which to many has been advantageous to body and mind has been to others the means of financial and moral loss.
The custom is pernicious in the extreme where scores of men in respectable life give themselves up to betting, now on this boat now on that--now on the Atlantics and now on the Athletics.
Betting, that once was chiefly the accompaniment of the race-course, is fast becoming a national habit, and in some circles any opinion advanced on finance or politics is accosted with the interrogatory--"How much will you bet on _that_, sir?"
This custom may make no appeal to slow, lethargic temperaments, but there are in the country tens of thousands of quick, nervous, sanguine, excitable temperaments ready to be acted upon, and their feet will soon take hold on death.
For some months and perhaps for years they will linger in the more polite and elegant circle of gamesters, but, after a while, their pathway will come to the fatal plunge.
Finding themselves in the rapids, they will try to back out, and, hurled over the brink, they will clutch the side of the boat until their finger-nails, blood-tipped, will pierce the wood, and then, with white cheek and agonized stare, and the horrors of the lost soul lifting the very hair from the scalp, they will plunge down where no grappling hooks can drag them out.
Young man!
stand back from all styles of gambling!
The end thereof is death.
The gamblers enter the ten-pin alley where are husbands, brothers, and fathers.
"Put down your thousand dollars all in gold eagles!
Let the boy set up the pins at the other end of the alley!
Now stand back, and give the gamester full sweep!
Roll the first--there!
it strikes!
and down goes his respectability.
Try it again.
Roll the second--there!
it strikes!
and down goes the last feeling of humanity.
Try it again.
Roll the third--there!
it strikes!
and down goes his soul forever.
It was not so much the pins that fell as the soul!
the soul!
FATAL TEN-STRIKE FOR ETERNITY!"
Shall I sketch the history of the gambler?
Lured by bad company, he finds his way into a place where honest men ought never to go.
He sits down to his first game only for pastime and the desire of being thought sociable.
The players deal out the cards.
They unconsciously play into Satan's hands, who takes all the tricks, and both the players' souls for trumps--he being a sharper at any game.
A slight stake is put up just to add interest to the play.
Game after game is played.
Larger stakes and still larger.
They begin to move nervously on their chairs.
Their brows lower and eyes flash, until now they who win and they who lose, fired alike with passion, sit with set jaws, and compressed lips, and clenched fists, and eyes like fire-balls that seem starting from their sockets, to see the final turn before it comes; if losing, pale with envy and tremulous with unuttered oaths cast back red-hot upon the heart--or, winning, with hysteric laugh--"Ha!
Ha!
I have it!
I have it!"
A few years have passed, and he is only the wreck of a man.
Seating himself at the game ere he throws the first card, he stakes the last relic of his wife, and the marriage-ring which sealed the solemn vows between them.
The game is lost, and, staggering back in exhaustion, he dreams.
The bright hours of the past mock his agony, and in his dreams, fiends, with eyes of fire and tongues of flame, circle about him with joined hands, to dance and sing their orgies with hellish chorus, chanting--"Hail!
brother!"
kissing his clammy forehead until their loathsome locks, flowing with serpents, crawl into his bosom and sink their sharp fangs and suck up his life's blood, and coiling around his heart pinch it with chills and shudders unutterable.
Take warning!
You are no stronger than tens of thousands who have, by this practice, been overthrown.
No young man in our cities can escape being tempted.
_Beware of the first beginnings!
_ This road is a down-grade, and every instant increases the momentum.
Launch not upon this treacherous sea.
Split hulks strew the beach.
Everlasting storms howl up and down, tossing the unwary crafts into the Hell-gate.
I
speak of what I have seen with my own eyes.
I have looked off into the abyss and have seen the foaming, and the hissing, and the whirling of the horrid deep in which the mangled victims writhed, one upon another, and struggled, strangled, blasphemed, and died--the death-stare of eternal despair upon their countenances as the waters gurgled over them.
To a gambler's death-bed there comes no hope.
He will probably die alone.
His former associates come not nigh his dwelling.
When the hour comes, his miserable soul will go out of a miserable life into a miserable eternity.
As his poor remains pass the house where he was ruined, old companions may look out a moment and say--"There goes the old carcass--dead at last," but they will not get up from the table.
Let him down now into his grave.
Plant no tree to cast its shade there, for the long, deep, eternal gloom that settles there is shadow enough.
Plant no "forget-me-nots" or eglantines around the spot, for flowers were not made to grow on such a blasted heath.
Visit it not in the sunshine, for that would be mockery, but in the dismal night, when no stars are out, and the spirits of darkness come down horsed on the wind, _then_ visit the grave of the gambler!
