p. 6 | Gambling Among Women

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 3, 1907

Gambling Among Women

When a besieging army begins to scale the walls of a city, all but the stoutest hearted of its defenders lose hope. We look upon the home as a citadel of defense for the growing generation; but Satan has massed his strongest weapons against that citadel, and his minions are trooping over the wall of many a home. The matter of drinking and whist parties for stakes, participated in by mothers in their homes, has excited startled comment on both sides of the Atlantic; and men of the world have asked one another what moral anchorage a child has who is brought up in such an atmosphere. The blighting influence of such examples is seen in the increase of crime, intemperance, blasphemy, vice, and lack of all moral restraint. Now comes a correspondent of the London Sunday-school Chronicle with the avowal that “gambling among women is spreading with alarming rapidity.” He says:—

In many industrial centers, women are more severely tempted to gamble than men. The operatives in workshops and factories go to the book-makers, but the book-makers go round the workmen's houses when they are absent at work and collect money from their wives.

The committee of the House of Lords elicited much information about betting women. Mr. Robert Knight, who was for twenty-nine years general secretary of the Boiler-makers' and Iron and Steel Shipbuilders' Society, testified that it was within his personal knowledge that house-to-house betting had become a terrible evil—one of the worst that he knew of in the Newcastle district. He could give the names of many mothers who had taken things out of the house and pawned them to get money to bet with.

What Mr. Knight said of Newcastle, Mr. F. W. Tannett-Walker, speaking as a large employer of labor, confirmed with respect to the Leeds district. As a rule, the workingmen, he said, only betted with their pocket-money, as they called it, while the women very often risked the money their husbands had given them.

The gambling mania which is now flourishing in the homes of the people, is being strengthened by the use of intoxicating liquors, which benumb the conscience; and these twin children of the evil one work hand in hand to destroy the souls and bodies of young and old alike.