or the boy's
youth; he was a mark for every obscene bird of prey that haunts the
Turf; respectable betting men gave him fair play, though they exacted
their pound of flesh; the birds of Night gave him no fair play at all.
In a few short months he had poured a quarter of a million into the
bursting pockets of the Ring, and he was at last "posted" for the paltry
sum of L1,400. This tragic farce was not enacted in a corner; a hundred
journals printed every act as it was played; the victim never received
that one hearty flogging which might have saved him, and the curtain was
at last rung down on a smug, grinning group of bookmakers, a deservedly
ruined spendthrift, and a mob of indifferent lookers-on. So minutely
circumstantial were the newspapers, that we may say that all England saw
a gigantic robbery being committed, and no man, on the Turf or off,
interfered by so much as a sign. Decidedly, the Ethics of the Turf offer
an odd study for the moralist; and, in passing, I may say that the
national ethics are also a little queer. We ruin a tradesman who lets
two men play a game at billiards for sixpence on licensed premises, and
we allow a silly boy to be rooked of a quarter of a million in nine
months, although the robbery is as well-known as if it were advertised
over the whole front page of _The Times_ day by day.

In sum, then, we have an inner circle of bookmakers who take care either
to bet on figures alone, or on perfectly accurate and secret
information; we have another circle of sharp owners and backers, who, by
means of modified (or unmodified) false pretences, succeed at times in
beating the bookmakers; we have then an outer circle, composed partly of
stainless gentlemen who do not bet and who want no man's money, partly
of perfectly honest fellows who have no judgment, no real knowledge, and
no self-restraint, and who serve as prey on which the bookmakers batten.

And then we have circle on circle showing every shade of vice, baseness,
cupidity, and blank folly. First, I may glance--and only glance--at the
unredeemed, hopeless villains who are the immediate hangers-on of the
Turf. People hardly believe that there are thousands of sturdy,
able-bodied men scattered among our great towns and cities who have
never worked, and who never mean to work. In their hoggish way they feed
well and lie warm--the phrase is their own favourite--and they subsist
like odious reptiles, fed from mysterious sources. Go to any suburb