t that all winnings should be handed over to the
Hospital Fund. The room was soon comparatively deserted. The interest
was not billiards, so much as billiards plus the money won or lost in
betting on billiards.

When I am told that to stake a trifle upon a game is not for the sake
of winning money, so much as to give the due seasoning of excitement to
amusement, I have to remark that in a few cases this may be so, but it
is not the explanation of betting. Almost entirely it comes to mean
the desire to win money for which we have given, and intend to give, no
just equivalent. That almost deserted room on the church premises
tells the truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of
amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of
people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In
the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false
and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the
former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a
flourishing one, without working for it--a greatly coveted science in
these days. It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this
way, than by honest toil with head or hands, or both. The notorious
fact that betting strikes at the root-principle of worthy and strenuous
labour, is not the least of the vicious features of this many-sided
evil.

It also creates the most hopeless form of selfishness, and it grows by
what it feeds on. The avarice of betting destroys the best part of us.
As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is
left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well
describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to
death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the
side, and cumbers Nature like a rotten branch."

To my thinking, it is a waste of time to ask, and it is an abuse of
time to discuss the question, wherein the wrong or evil of betting
consists. The practice has evil consequences, and evil consequences
only; and they necessarily become the more evil the more widely it is
diffused throughout society. What other proof of wrong does a
right-minded person ask? My estimate of the effects of betting is such
that I would neither employ nor trust any man who is addicted to it.

I hope and believe that I am talking to young men who have never
touched this dangerous thing. Continu