Each successive year sees an increase in the number of betters, who contribute indirectly, by means of subscriptions to the races, a very important proportion of the budget of the Jockey Club.  But if any one should imagine from this constant growth of receipts that the taste for racing is extending in France, and is likely to become national, he would be making a great mistake:  what is growing, and with alarming rapidity, is the passion for gambling, for the indulgence of which the “improvement of the breed of horses” is but a convenient and sufficiently transparent veil.  Whether the money of the player rolls around the green carpet of the race-course or upon that of M. Blanc at Monte Carlo, the impulse that keeps it in motion is the same, and the book-maker’s slate is as dangerous as the roulette-table.  The manager of the one piles up a fortune as surely as the director of the other, and in both cases the money seems to be made with an almost mathematical certainty and regularity.  They tell of one day—­that of the Grand Prix of 1877—­when Saffery, the Steel of the French turf and the leviathan of bookmakers, cleared as much as fifty thousand dollars.  Wright, Valentine, Morris and many more make in proportion to their outlay.  Four or five years ago these worthies had open offices on the Rue de Choiseul and the Boulevard des Italiens, where betting on the English and French races went on night and day; but the police, following the lead of that of London, stepped in to put an end to this traffic in contraband goods, and the shops for the sale of this sort of merchandise are now shut up.  But if all this has been done, and if even those great voitures de poules which once made the most picturesque ornament of the turf, have been banished out of sight, it has been impossible to uproot the practice of betting, which has more devotees to-day than ever before.  It has been discovered in other countries than France that the only way to deal with an ineradicable evil is to check its growth, and an attempt to prohibit pool-selling a year or two ago in one of the States of this Union only resulted in the adoption of an ingenious evasion whereby the pictures of the horses entered were sold at auction—­a practice which is, if I am not misinformed, still kept up.  The same fiction, under another form, is to be seen to-day in France.  In order to bet openly one has to buy an entrance—­ticket to the paddock, which costs him twenty francs, whereas the general entry to the grounds is but one franc, and any one found betting outside the enclosure or enceinte of the stables is liable to arrest.  The police, no doubt, are willing to accept the theory that a man who can afford to pay twenty francs for a little square of rose- or yellow-tinted paper is rich enough to be allowed to indulge in any other extravagant freaks that he pleases.