GAMING, although at all times an object highly deserving attention, and calling for the exertions of Magistrates, never appeared either to have assumed so alarming an aspect, or to have been conducted upon the methodized system of _Partnership-Concerns_, wherein pecuniary capitals were embarked, till about the years 1777 and 1778, when the vast licence which was given to those abominable engines of fraud, EO Tables, and the great length of time which elapsed before a check was given to them by the Police, afforded a number of dissolute and abandoned characters, who resorted to these baneful subterfuges for support, an opportunity of acquiring property: This was afterwards increased in low Gaming Houses, and by following up the same system at Newmarket, and other places of fashionable resort, and in the Lottery; until at length, without any property at the outset, or any visible means of lawful support, a sum of money, little short of _One Million Sterling_, is said to have been acquired by a class of individuals originally (with some few exceptions) of the lowest and most depraved order of Society. This enormous mass of wealth (acquired no doubt by entailing misery on many worthy and respectable Families, and driving the unhappy victims to acts of desperation and suicide,) is said to have been afterwards engaged as a great and an efficient capital for carrying on various illegal Establishments; particularly Gaming-Houses, and Shops for fraudulent Insurances in the Lottery; together with such objects of dissipation as the Races at Newmarket and other places of _fashionable_ resort, held out: all which were employed as the means of increasing and improving the ill-gotten wealth of the parties engaged in these nefarious pursuits. A System, grown to such an enormous height, had, of course, its rise by progressive advances. Several of those who now roll in their gaudy carriages, and associate with some men of high rank and fashion, may be found upon the Registers of the Old Bailey; or traced to the vagrant pursuit of turning, with their own hands, EO Tables in the open streets; These mischievous Members of Society, through the wealth obtained by a course of procedure diametrically opposite to Law, are, by a strange perversion, sheltered from the operation of that Justice, which every act of their lives has offended: they bask in the sun-shine of prosperity; while thousands, who owe their distress and ruin to the horrid designs thus _executed_, _invigorated_ and _extended_, are pining in misery and want.