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OF GAMBLING

       Table of Contents

      By John A. Hobson

      Gambling is the determination of the ownership of property by appeal to chance. By chance is here implied the resultant of a play of natural forces that cannot be controlled or calculated by those who appeal to it. In tossing “heads or tails” for the possession of a coin, neither party has any knowledge or control of the adjustment of forces which determines upon which side the coin will fall, or if by practice the tosser acquires such knowledge or control, he cannot possibly predict or control the “call” of his opponent, which thus keeps the determination of the issue within the realm of “Chance.”

      Gambling may be described as “pure” or “mixed” according as the determining power of chance is or is not blended with other powers. Few so-called games of chance are entirely destitute of skill, even if the skill consists entirely of speed or accuracy in calculating “chances.” Where such skill plays a large and a continuous part, the game ceases to be classed as “gambling,” though chance may exercise a quite considerable influence in determining the result. In betting on horse-races and in commercial gambling superior knowledge of some of the determinant causes may so qualify the chance that, from the standpoint of those who have such knowledge, the operation ceases to be gambling. If such knowledge is equally attainable by all those who “speculate,” the game becomes one of skill; if it consists in genuine “tips” or private knowledge, the operation is fraudulent. This last fact is generally recognised: all gamesters denounce betting on “certainties.” Again, both on the turf and the stock exchange chance may be reduced or even eliminated by an actual manipulation of the forces so as to yield a result favourable to the interests of some of those who pose as gamblers. But when the result supposed to rest on chance is known or controlled by any sort of skill, fraud, or force, the case is not one of pure gambling; for though it is a matter of significance that gambling commonly keeps company with cheating, the latter is not gambling.

      Where the skilful draftsmanship of a lottery prospectus allures the dull or sanguine reader into staking his money, by deceiving him as to the size of his chance of winning, such trickery, though designed to appeal to the gambling instinct of investors, is not itself an act or a part of gambling: it is simply fraud, though not necessarily fraud in a legal sense.

      On the other hand, when the terms of a lottery are clearly understood by those who stake their money, the mere fact that the managers arrange the speculation so as to procure for themselves a known and certain gain, offering prizes admittedly of less value than the aggregate of the stakes, need not debar us from regarding the proceeding as “pure gambling” so far as the players are concerned. So with the roulette-table at Monte Carlo: the players are aware that the chances are favourable to the bank over a prolonged piece of play, they even know the precise amount of this bias. But this knowledge does not prevent their play from ranking as pure gambling, for no skill or knowledge or trickery on their part can enter in as a determinant of the result.

      Thus an honestly managed lottery, or roulette, may fairly serve as a type of pure gambling which will serve to enable us to test the psychology and ethics of the proceeding.

      Before approaching the distinctively moral aspects of gambling, we must clearly realise its intellectual reactions. The rational basis of the acquisition of property is the “natural” relation of effort to satisfaction. A man who converts an unshaped piece of matter into an object of human utility may be said to have a “natural” property in it. And this in a double sense. The expenditure of human energy given out in this piece of labour requires recuperation: this recuperation is achieved by “consuming” that which he has made, or its equivalent obtained by processes of equal exchange. The effort of production requires the satisfaction of consumption. Thus it is commonly recognised that labour, or human effort, is the natural basis of the right of property. Or, regarding the same relation on its psychical side with reference to motive, we perceive that a property in that which he has made must be accorded to the maker wherever any painful effort of production is required, in order to induce his will to sanction the effort. In a society where social forces co-operate with individual effort a full property in that which a man is said to make may not be essential, but that is because no man working in society and for a market can truly be said to make the whole of anything, much less its “value” when it is made. But everywhere some proportion of property must be guaranteed to the individual who is required to exert himself in productive labour. Any form of theft, fraud, extortion, “sweating,” on the part of individuals or governments, is liable to interfere with this physical and psychical adjustment between production and consumption, output of effort and intake of satisfaction, which forms the natural or rational basis of individual property. Just in proportion as this rational character is firmly and clearly stamped upon the processes of the acquisition of property do we possess security of social order and progress. When property comes to any one in any other way, its transfer has an “unreasonable” character. So a society where force or fraud habitually or frequently displaces this sane process of acquiring property, where some persons eat bread sudore vultus alieni and others consequently sweat without eating, is not only economically enfeebled, but is irrationally constituted. And this unreason in the social organism corrupts and derationalises the individual members. But even an unjustly ordered society, where the domination of one class is accompanied by the subjection of another, where organised parasitism or plunder prevails, differs from “anarchy” as regards its reactions upon the intelligence of man. A bad system, the worst of systems, is less derationalising than no system. So the habitual exploitation of the poor by the rich, the “have-nots” by the “haves,” though substantially irrational in the modes of acquisition of property involved, is less demoralising than the abandonment of the determination of property to pure chance.

      Gambling involves the denial of all system in the apportionment of property: it plunges the mind in a world of anarchy, where things come upon one and pass from one miraculously. It does not so manifestly sin against the canons of justice as do other bad modes of transfer—theft, fraud, sweating—for every one is said to have an equal chance; but it inflicts a graver damage on the intellect. Based as it is on an organised rejection of all reason as a factor, it removes its devotees into a positive atmosphere of miracles, and generates an emotional excitement that inhibits those checks which reason more or less contrives to place upon emotional extravagances. The essence of gambling consists in an abandonment of reason, an inhibition of the factors of human control. In the history of mankind, civilisation of the individual has chiefly consisted in and been measured by this increased capacity of rational control—a slow, gradual, imperfect taming of the animal instincts which made for emotional anarchy of conduct.

      This assertion of rational control, implying some sort of plan in life, restraints on conduct, and trust in orderly processes of phenomena, has doubtless been most imperfectly established even in the picked members of the more highly civilised races. But such as it is, it represents order in society and progress in humanity.

      The practice of gambling is thus exhibited as a deliberate reversion to those passions and that mental attitude which characterise the savage or pre-human man in his conduct and his outlook. There lurk in “civilised” man the remnants of survivals of countless ages of pre-human and of savage heredity, anarchic passions associated with barbarous superstitions. The order of civilisation claims to have killed or atrophied the grosser forms of these atavistic tendencies, but many of them are not dead; social control and education of individual habits keeps them in subordination or acquiescence, but on temptation they are ready to awake. Just as war and certain forms of sport can call from the caverns of heredity brutish traits whose presence was utterly unknown to their possessors, so the interest of gambling discovers in many natures a similarly fatal inheritance.

      Maeterlinck has recently sought to find a quasi-rational basis for “luck” in the occasional revival of certain primitive instincts of self-protection which, seldom needed in the higher progress of humanity, have died down and rarely assert themselves. Whether such latent powers of extra-rational warning exist or ever did exist, we need not here discuss; it is, however, quite evident that the widespread belief in “luck” among gamblers is a reversion

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