of wagering or gaming in any street,
road, highway, or other open and public place to which the public have
or are permitted to have access, at or with any table or instrument of
gaming, or any coin, card, token, or other article used as an instrument
of gaming or means of such wagering or gaming, at any game or pretended
game of chance, shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond within the true
intent and meaning of the recited Act, and as such may be punished under
the provision of that Act.'

On this provision a daily paper justly remarks:--'A statute very much
needed has come into force. Persons playing or betting in the streets
with coins or cards are now made amenable to the 5th George IV., c.
83, and may be committed to gaol as rogues and vagabonds. The statutes
already in force against such rogues and vagabonds subject them, we
believe, not only to imprisonment with hard labour, but also to corporal
punishment. In any case the New Act should, if stringently administered,
speedily put a stop to the too common and quite intolerable nuisance of
young men and boys sprawling about the pavement, or in corners of
the wharves by the waterside, and playing at "pitch-and-toss,"
"shove-halfpenny," "Tommy Dodd," "coddams," and other games of chance.
Who has not seen that terrible etching in Hogarth's "Industry and
Idleness," where the idle apprentice, instead of going devoutly to
church and singing out of the same hymn-book with his master's pretty
daughter, is gambling on a tombstone with a knot of dissolute boys? A
watchful beadle has espied the youthful gamesters, and is preparing
to administer a sounding thwack with a cane on the shoulders of Thomas
Idle. But the race of London beadles is now well-nigh extinct; and the
few that remain dare not use their switches on the small vagabonds, for
fear of being summoned for assault. It is to be hoped that the
police will be instructed to put the Act sharply in force against the
pitch-and-toss players; and, in passing, we might express a wish that
they would also suppress the ragged urchins who turn "cart-wheels" in
the mud, and the half-naked girls who haunt the vicinity of railway
stations and steamboat piers, pestering passengers to buy cigar-lights.'

END OF VOL. I.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and
Victims, by Andrew Steinmetz

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