English betting-rings.

But I am not so much concerned with the personality of the various
sorts of gamblers, and I assuredly have no pity to spare for the
gentry who lose their money. A great deal of good useful compassion is
wasted on the victims who are fleeced in the gambling places. Victims!
What do they go to the rooms for? Is it not to amuse themselves and to
pass away time amid false exhilaration? Is it not to gain money
without working for it? The dupe has in him all the raw material of a
scoundrel; and even when he blows his stupid brains out I cannot pity
him so much as I pity the dogged labourer who toils on and starves
until his time comes for going to the workhouse. I am rather more
inclined to study the general manifestations of the gambling spirit. I
have in my mind's eye vivid images of the faces, the figures, the
gestures of hundreds of gamblers, and I might make an appalling
picture-gallery if I chose; but such a nightmare in prose would not do
much good to any one, and I prefer to proceed in a less exciting but
more profitable manner. We please ourselves by calling to mind the
days when "society" gambled openly and constantly; and we like to
fancy that we are all very good and spotless now-a-days and free from
the desire for unnatural excitement. Well, I grant that most European
societies in the last century were sufficiently hideous in many
respects. The English aristocrat, male or female, cared only for
cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly
where _piquet_ and _ecarte_ were not going on. The French seigneur
gambled away an estate in an evening; the Russian landowner staked a
hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card;
little German princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of
soldiers. The pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and
letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little
excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the
past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of
evil. For my own part, when I see the mode of life now generally
followed by most of our European aristocracies, I am quite ready to be
grateful for a beneficent change, and I have again and again made
light of the wailings of persons who persist in chattering about the
good old times. But I am talking now about the spirit of the gambler;
and I cannot say that the human propensity to gamble