We, Americans, have seen and severely felt the highly pernicious and demoralizing tendency of _gambling_; and we have been long wishing to break up the practice; and our selectmen, or committee, were determined to effect it. We accordingly took a vote, agreeably to the custom of our country, and it was found to be the will of the majority to prohibit the practice of it. We began with the _roulette_ table, or as our men called them, "wheels of fortune." After no small opposition from the French officers, we succeeded in putting them down; but we could not succeed so easily against the billiard tables. It was contended by many that it was an exercise, and a trial of skill; and if confined to a halfpenny, or one cent a game, it could not be dangerous to the morals, or property of the community. On this a warm and long dispute arose, in defining gambling. The playing of billiards for a cent a game, was contended to be a muscular exercise, and not gambling; whereas cards were denounced, as a studied, sedentary contrivance, for the artful to draw money from the pockets of the artless. The owners of "the wheels of fortune" were, perhaps, envied. They made money, and lived better than the rest; and the same remark was made of the owners of the billiard tables. In the course of debate they were tauntingly called the _privileged order_, and rising from one degree of odious epithet to another, I could not help laughing, on hearing one angry orator pronounce this scheme of screwing money out of the pockets of the artless, and then laughing at their poverty and distress, to be down right FEDERALISM. Now it should be known that a _Federalist_ and _Federalism_, are the most odious ideas that can be raised up in the minds of every American prisoner in this river. A law was, therefore, proposed, to fine any American prisoner, who should call another a _Federalist_.