t game ever knows why. Ask a
great money-maker what he wants to do with his money--he never knows. He
doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he _may_
get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll
get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no
use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game.
And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other
people is the game. So all that great foul city of London
there,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of
fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore,--you fancy it
is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very
nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's
cricket ground without the turf,--a huge billiard table without the
cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit; but mainly a
billiard table, after all.

Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It
differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money,
while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce
money. There's a great difference between 'winning' money and 'making'
it; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same
thing as making it; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and much
of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of
taxation on carriage or exchange.

Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly
altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses,
gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that
beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now:
but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless
game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through
horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere
call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that is--gambling; by
no means a beneficial or recreative game: and, through game-preserving,
you get also some curious laying out of ground; that beautiful
arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse
and black-cock--so many brace to the acre, and men and women--so many
brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and
surveyors--the angelic builde