The machinery of revenue reduces itself to this: first catch a Jew. For your petty villainies any man will suffice; but for your grand schemes of wholesale plunder, there is nothing like an Israelite; besides, he has a kind of pride in his vocation. For the privilege of the gambling- table he will pay munificently, he will keep the whole grand-ducal realm in beer and beetroot the year through, and give a very respectable privy purse to the sovereign besides. To him you deliver up all the nations of the earth outside your own little frontier, none of those within it being under any pretext admitted inside the walls of the gambling-house; for, like the sick apothecary, you know better than to take anything in the shop. You give him a carte-blanche, sparing the little realm of Hesse-Homburg, to cheat the English, pigeon the Russians, ruin French, Swedes, Swiss, and Yankees to his heart’s content; you set no limits to his grand career of roguery; you deliver, bound, into his hands all travellers within your realm, to be fleeced as it may seem fit. What care you for the din of factories or the clanking hammers of the foundries? The rattle of the dice-box and the scraping of the croupier’s mace are pleasanter sounds, and fully as suggestive of wealth. You need not descend into the bowels of the earth for riches; the gold, ready stamped from the mint, comes bright and shining to your hand. Fleets may founder and argosies may sink, but your dollars come safely in the pockets of their owners, and are paid, without any cost of collection, into the treasury of the State. Manchester may glut the earth with her printed calicoes, Sheffield may produce more carving-knives than there are carvers. _Your_ resources can suffer no such casualties as these; you trade upon the vices of mankind, and need never dread a year of scarcity. The passion for play is more contagious than the smallpox, and unhappily the malady returns after the first access. Every gambler who leaves fifty napoleons in your territory is bound in a kind of recognisance to return next year and lose double the sum. Each loss is but an instalment of the grand total of his ruin, and you have contracted for that. But even the winner does not escape you. A hundred temptations are provided to seduce him into extravagance and plunge him into expense-- tastes are suggested, and habits of luxury inculcated, that turn out sad comforters when a reverse of fortune compels him to a more limited expenditure; so that when you extinguish the unlucky man by a summary process, you reserve a lingering death for the more fortunate one. In the language of the dock, it is only ‘a long day’ he obtains, after all.