, a young man having just come
from the mines deposited a large sum upon the ace, and won twenty-two
thousand dollars. But the tide turns. Intense anxiety comes upon the
countenances of all. Slowly the cards went forth. Every eye is fixed.
Not a sound is heard, until the ace is revealed favorable to the bank.
There are shouts of "Foul! Foul!" but the keepers of the table
produce their pistols and the uproar is silenced, and the bank has won
ninety-five thousand dollars. Do you call this a game of chance? There
is no chance about it.

But these dishonesties in the carrying on of the game are nothing when
compared with the frauds which are committed in order to get money
to go on with the nefarious work. Gambling, with its greedy hand, has
snatched away the widow's mite and the portion of the orphans; has
sold the daughter's virtue to get means to continue the game; has
written the counterfeit signature, emptied the banker's money vault,
and wielded the assassin's dagger. There is no depth of meanness to
which it will not stoop. There is no cruelty at which it is appalled.
There is no warning of God that it will not dare. Merciless,
unappeasable, fiercer and wilder it blinds, it hardens, it rends, it
blasts, it crushes, it damns. It has peopled Moyamensing, and Auburn,
and Sing Sing.

How many railroad agents, and cashiers, and trustees of funds, it has
driven to disgrace, incarceration, and suicide! Witness a cashier of
the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, who stole one
hundred and three thousand dollars to carry on his gaming practices.
Witness the forty thousand dollars stolen from a Brooklyn bank; and
the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars taken from a Wall Street
Insurance Company for the same purpose! These are only illustrations
on a large scale of the robberies _every day_ committed for the
purpose of carrying out the designs of gamblers. Hundreds of thousands
of dollars every year leak out without observation from the merchant's
till into the gambling hell.

A man in London keeping one of these gambling houses boasted that he
had ruined a nobleman a day; but if all the saloons of this land were
to speak out, they might utter a more infamous boast, for they have
destroyed a thousand noblemen a year.

Notice also the effect of this crime upon domestic happiness. It hath
sent its ruthless ploughshare through hundreds of families, until the
wife sat in rags, and the daughters were disgraced,