You know the sort of argument?  Reduced to its essentials it is simply this:—­That a few rich people are fond of gambling and fond of the excitement that is concentrated in the few minutes of the horse race.  Some others, not so rich, believe that by combining horse-racing with a certain amount of cunning and bold cheating they can make a great deal of money.  A few speculators have invested funds in spaces of open turf, and turn these spaces into race courses.  Having no alternative, no safer method of gambling offered them, and being as fond of gambling as other peoples of the world, the men of the labouring classes and a few of their women, the publicans and their frequenters, army officers, farmers, and women of uncertain virtue stake their money on horses they have never seen, who may not even exist, and thus keep the industry going.  And the chevaliers of this “industry,” the go-betweens, the parasites of this sport, are the twelve thousand professional book-makers and racing touts.

Somehow the Turf has during the last hundred years, together with its allies the Distillers and Brewers, the Licensed Victuallers and the Press that is supported by these agencies, acquired such a hold over the Government Departments, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and Liberal politicians who are descended from county families, that it has more interest with those who govern us than the Church, the Nonconformist Conscience, the County Palatine of Lancaster or any other body of corporate opinion.  So that when in September, 1913, representatives of the Turf (and no doubt of the Trade Unions) went to the Home Secretary in reference to the burning and bombing of racing stables, trainers’ houses, Grand Stands and the residences of racing potentates, and said “Look here!  This has GOT TO STOP,” the Home Secretary and the Cabinet knew they were up against no ordinary crisis.  At the same time Sir Edward Carson, the Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. F.E.  Smith and nearly a third of the Colonels in the British Army of Ulster descent were actively organizing armed resistance to any measure of Home Rule; while Keltiberian Ireland was setting up the Irish Volunteers to start a Home Rule insurrection.  You can therefore imagine for yourselves the mental irritability of members of the Liberal Cabinet in the autumn of the sinister year 1913.  I have been told that there were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour....  Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest.

In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them:  the Great War must have come almost as a relief.  Not one of them was what you would call a bad man.  Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who says to the recently spanked child, “You know, dear, it hurts me almost as much as it hurts you.”  If one met them out at dinner parties, or in an express train which they could not stop by pulling the communication cord, and sympathized with their dilemma, they would ask plaintively what they could do.  They could not yield to violence and anarchy; yet they could not let women die in prison.