During recent years much has been written and said against the system of betting for ready money. Of all the "fads" (the reader is asked to excuse this vulgarism) connected with gambling on the turf that have become prominent during recent years the denunciation of ready money betting is certainly the most extraordinary--the most abused of them all. Ready money betting has been declared illegal. But why should betting in ready money be wrong if betting on credit be right? If any kind of betting be proper it most assuredly should be betting for ready money, than which there ought to be no other kind of betting. The rules of logic were never surely so much set at naught as when it was decreed that betting by means of the payment of ready money--that is to say the depositing of the stakes--should be stigmatised as being illegal. Probably by an interpretation of the law there is no such thing as legal betting; it has hitherto been held that betting of any kind is illegal. Bets are not recoverable at law; but bets made by one party who acts as agent for another party can be sued for, and may be recovered; at any rate the person who instructs an agent to make a bet on his behalf can be sued in a court of law for the amount of the stake. It surely is reasonable to argue that if betting for ready money be bad, betting on credit is worse. Everything points to the probability of betting when it began being for ready money only, and that as a rule stakes on both sides were deposited pending the event to be decided. Why should it not be so to-day? With the advent of credit betting began the reign of the "blacklegs," the nefarious frauds and swindles, the poisonings and pullings, the watering and watching of horses, with which men who interest themselves in the sport of kings are now so familiar. Judging from the tone of recent legislation, what our parliamentarians are wroth about is, that betting has become a business requiring the intervention of that middle man, the obnoxious "bookmaker," but it is really better that it should be so, if betting on horse-racing is to be allowed to be continued in any shape. Why should men who will never cease to bet so long as horse-racing goes on be driven to bet one with another, which is the worst form of speculation? Who can mention any more humiliating spectacle than that furnished by a "noble" sportsman "doing" his friend over the Derby, or some other race? In reality that is the kind of betting pointed at by some of our turf big-wigs as being the best form of speculation of the kind; to these men the bookmaker is a disgust.