e, and laws
passed to imprison him if found practising his art, the gambler in
stocks is neither reviled nor imprisoned. At the rank injustice, as he,
in our opinion, honestly believes it, of this course on the part of
society, he can hardly contain his indignation. Those "uncouth
gestures," as one of our contemporaries designates them, were not in our
opinion intended for effect, but were the natural language of
uncontrollable indignation at what he believes to be the rank in justice
of society, which he could not adequately express in words. The audience
laughed, but the speaker was far from laughing--a perfect tempest of
conflicting emotions, it seemed to us, was agitating his bosom. Strange
as it may sound to our readers, he evidently thought that his cause was
just, and wanted to make it appear so, not to the gamblers and their
friends, hundreds of whom were present, and ready at any moment with
their applause, but to the crowd of intelligent, virtuous men and women,
in whose audience he stood. We saw the breaking out of this feeling in
the half-contemptuous manner in which he alluded to the tastes of
gamblers in general, as contrasted with his own--"he did not keep the
company of gamblers; he had nothing to say against them, but his tastes
were different."

But is it unjust to punish the gambler with cards by imprisonment and
public proscription, while the gambler in stocks, &c., whose crime is
the same in principle, though not in degree, goes unwhipt of justice?
Undoubtedly it is, for it is no reason that one vice should go
unpunished, because another is able to escape for the present. Mr.
Freeman's argument is very good, so far as it applies to inflicting upon
the gambler in stocks the same penalty as on himself; but the law of
Progress, and the best interests of society, demand that these things
should never be allowed to work backwards. For the way society advances,
is simply this--the worst manifestations of vice are first proscribed,
and then their proscription is made a stepping-stone to demolish others.
For instance--we attack gambling with cards, the worst manifestation of
the gambling principle; we make it abhorrent to the moral sense of the
world; we so confound it, and justly too, with robbery, that future
generations shall grow up in that faith, and all the efforts of
interested sophistry never be able henceforward to separate them to the
popular apprehension. Having done this, in the course of some f