In a gaming-house in San Francisco, 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, and the sons grew up to the same infamous practices, or took a short cut to destruction across the murderer’s scaffold.  Home has lost all charms for the gambler.  How tame are the children’s caresses and a wife’s devotion to the gambler!  How drearily the fire burns on the domestic hearth!  There must be louder laughter, and something to win and something to lose; an excitement to drive the heart faster and fillip the blood and fire the imagination.  No home, however bright, can keep back the gamester.  The sweet call of love bounds back from his iron soul, and all endearments are consumed in the flame of his passion.  The family Bible will go after all other treasures are lost, and if his everlasting crown in heaven were put into his hand he would cry:  “Here goes, one more game, my boys!  On this one throw I stake my crown of heaven.”