Charitable Gambling

Publishing Committee · BATTLE CREEK, MICH. · May 27, 1858

Charitable Gambling.

Within the last few months our citizens have frequently been called upon to contribute to eleemosynary, religious, or industrial institutions, and the pecuniary success of nearly all these appeals doubtless suggests many agreeable reflections upon the enlightened liberality of this great city. It is gratifying to know that the poor have been fed and clothed, and the helpless outcasts of society, or the vagrants of our streets, brought under moral or educational influences, by private contributions, at no public cost; and the readiness with which those who are blessed with wealth and prosperity have dispensed their charities has been the cause of no little self-gratulation.

Our complacency at these happy results, however, should not blind us to the means by which, in many cases, they have been accomplished, and which may possibly, while curing one evil, engender another. It may surprise many who have been, as they supposed, innocently and honestly contributing to charitable objects, to learn that all the while they have been ministering to an offence against public morals, which, upon reflection, none would condemn more earnestly than themselves; and that their charitable motive has been in fact a selfish one, not having within it the elements of charity. Under the guise of charity, a practice abhorrent to morality and forbidden by the constitution and laws of the State, has been openly indulged in, and the public invited to give it the sanction of their approval.

It has become very much the fashion, during the

winter months, of late years, for ladies to hold Fairs for the purpose of assisting charitable or religious institutions, at which all kinds of articles, adapted to the season and its kindly offices, are offered for sale. Young ladies scarcely out of their teens, and staid matrons, on these occasions assume the duties of shop-women, and vie with each other in their efforts to dispose of the articles which they are commissioned to sell.

There is nothing very dangerous about this, certainly. The mere selling of the articles for a fair price, or even for an exorbitant price, if the buyer chooses to pay double or treble what the tradesman next door is willing to take, is perfectly harmless. But this is not the whole attraction, nor the chief attraction, of most of these fairs, as those of our readers who have attended the many that were held a few weeks ago very well know. From facts that have come to our knowledge we are convinced that the greater part of the large sums of money collected at them were realized by lotteries or "raffles," a species of gambling quite as culpable as faro or rouge et noir, or the many games of chance at which money is won, whatever may be the popular sentiment on the subject. However mortifying it may be to our self-complacency, it is nevertheless true, that the legitimate purposes of the Fair were not deemed sufficiently attractive to procure the attendance of visitors. As they could not be induced to buy articles, even for a charitable object, it was found necessary to devise some more exciting stimulus to their benevolence, and accordingly they were invited to risk a small sum for the chance of acquiring an article perhaps a hundred times its value, and thus combine the excitement of gambling with the dispensation of charities. Charity becomes very fascinating in this shape, and it was astonishing to see how persons never distinguished for offices of benevolence, all at once become deeply interested in the object for which the Fair was held, and crowded the tables at which the chances were dispensed, while those for the sale of articles was passed by with neglect. The Fair, the proceeds of which were to minister to the wants of poverty or ignorance-stricken outcasts, soon became one great lottery office, and in every direction busy throngs were buying chances, or awaiting the announcement of the lucky number.

Doubtless nine-tenths of the participants in these adventures did not imagine that they were transgressing any moral law, or if they did, quieted their consciences by saying that it was done for charity. They would probably all agree in denouncing gambling at public places or private clubs, and yet, indirectly, they were ministering to their own taste for it, and, what is worse, by giving a sort of respectability to the practice, were offering a most pernicious example to others. It was a still greater error to suppose that this conduct was dictated exclusively, or indeed principally, by charitable motives. Charity never appeals to the appetite for gain; she must be approached in all singleness of purpose, or she ceases to be charity, but is transformed into the blind and fickle goddess who is the fit patroness of the gaming table. It is impossible to make money out of one's charities—the thing becomes at once a business speculation, (in the present case, one of the most reckless character,) devoid of philanthropic motive, and no sophistry can make it otherwise.

The practice to which we have adverted, is one which it has always been peculiarly difficult to eradicate. Suppress it in one form, and it is pretty sure, after an interval, to reappear in another, and always in a disguise calculated to deceive the unthinking. Our ancestors were familiar with it under the name of public lotteries for charitable or educational institutions, and hospitals and colleges were built with the funds thus collected. The recent sale of Columbia College property has recalled the fact that this institution was mainly established by one of these lotteries. Art unions for the disposal by lotteries of pictures and statuary were also in favor for many years, and the encouragement to art which they were supposed to afford withheld attention from their effect upon public morals. Charity fairs are the latest phase, and as our readers are pretty well aware, flourish abundantly in a soil only too prolific. We regret to add that they are not the least pernicious form; for the discredit which they must eventually bring upon the practice of dispensing charities, and the indirect encouragement they offer to vice, cannot be over-estimated.

Only one thing remains to be done, and that is to discountenance the practice altogether, in whatever shape and under whatever circumstances it may appear. No gilding will hide the immoral element which is its germ. Nor can the specious but false philosophy of Burke, that vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, ever render it healthful or palatable. Charity can only suffer when brought into association with it, and it would perhaps be better that the dispensation of charities should diminish, if they are to be continued at such a cost, than that the morals of the community should be thus insidiously sapped. The constantly increasing indulgence in gambling, under every form, which is so melancholy a feature in our social system at the present day, particularly among young men, demands that no encouragement in this shape should be afforded to it.—Sel.