y a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any
town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces
which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of
roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste,
by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity,
and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a
brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and
belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the
gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modest
tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the
oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap
a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the
gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!

For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make
about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If
they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it!
Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror.
But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they
raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail--in order to feel
their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and
the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way--do
I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow
resources of The Garret, Grub Street?--it is but a skin-deep surface
symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London
and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and
Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.

"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the
supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial
objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is
attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men
are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the
sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is
only to the _kind_ of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at
which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other parties
stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in great
gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, is
co