It is, however, impossible to discuss the practical ethics of modern gambling without regarding that factor of pure gambling, which we have analysed, in its actual place as part of a vicious amalgam in a dissipated life. We have chiefly considered the derationalising influence of the anarchic element of chance which is the nucleus of the process. But, regarded as a mode of transfer of property, gambling involves a union of several anti-social desires. The desire to take unearned gains is, as we have seen, itself immoral, for such gains of necessity imply an injury to some other known or unknown persons, nor in the case of gambling is the damage thus done to the character of a winner mitigated by the knowledge that those from whom he wins have sought similar unearned gains at his expense. In many natures the possibility of such facile gain quickens the latent instinct of avarice, one of the most insidiously disintegrating influences in human society, inviting as it does complete self-absorption and an entire loss of sympathy with the material interests of one’s fellows. The brooding infatuation of the habitual gambler chills human sympathy more certainly than any other practice, inducing not indeed enmity or active animosity so much as a callousness which views the misfortunes of others with placid indifference. It is just this absorption upon selfish ends in reference to incidents fraught with emotional strain that is prone at once to break down the whole fabric of the moral character and to dethrone the reason. For as man is only moral and rational as a being who stands in orderly relation to other similar beings in human society, so a practice based on a virtual denial of this social order is the arch-enemy of human personality: instead of a man we have a self-absorbed emotionalist. “In the making of a bet—a man resolves to repress the use of his reason, his will, his conscience, his affections; only one part of his nature is allowed free play, and that is his emotions.”[1]