But let us look a little further into Mr. Freeman’s arguments.  He did not state them very plainly, being evidently unaccustomed to public speaking, and, as the English say, to “thinking on his legs,” but if we are not mistaken, he reasons to his own heart as follows.  Gambling in cards is not right abstractly, but it is the same in principle as gambling in stocks, in breadstuffs, in merchandise, in land, or in any thing else.  None of these are right, but they are necessary fruits of the folly and wickedness of men, and inevitable in the present condition of society.  “I make my living, I know,” he probably says, “from the weakness and wickedness of my fellow men; but so do the physician, the judge, the lawyer, the jailer, and the hangman.”  If we are not mistaken, in this way does Mr. Freeman make out a clear case to his own conscience; and to some small extent he is right in what he asserts.  To gamble with cards is the same principle as to gamble with stocks, or any thing else—­the difference is only one of degree; but although the gambler and the judge both live, in a certain sense, off of the vices of their fellow men, the difference is very evident between him whose business conduces to increase those vices, and his whose noble office it is to lessen them.

But Mr. Freeman complains that, while the gambler with cards is proscribed by society, and branded with all marks of shame, and laws passed to imprison him if found practising his art, the gambler in stocks is neither reviled nor imprisoned.  At the rank injustice, as he, in our opinion, honestly believes it, of this course on the part of society, he can hardly contain his indignation.  Those “uncouth gestures,” as one of our contemporaries designates them, were not in our opinion intended for effect, but were the natural language of uncontrollable indignation at what he believes to be the rank in justice of society, which he could not adequately express in words.  The audience laughed, but the speaker was far from laughing—­a perfect tempest of conflicting emotions, it seemed to us, was agitating his bosom.  Strange as it may sound to our readers, he evidently thought that his cause was just, and wanted to make it appear so, not to the gamblers and their friends, hundreds of whom were present, and ready at any moment with their applause, but to the crowd of intelligent, virtuous men and women, in whose audience he stood.  We saw the breaking out of this feeling in the half-contemptuous manner in which he alluded to the tastes of gamblers in general, as contrasted with his own—­“he did not keep the company of gamblers; he had nothing to say against them, but his tastes were different.”