Legislative enactments followed the Parliamentary Reports, and to a great extent swept away the miscellaneous gambling, which was only to make way, unhappily, for the more subtle form of turf betting. For years before the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the proprietors of public-houses (or persons in collusion with them), and of specially hired offices in the great towns, had been in the habit of using their premises for the purpose of accepting betting money, and, after a time, relations were established between them and some of the credit-betting professionals belonging to the clubs and subscription rooms. This was how betting by those away from the race-course continued, and even increased in volume, notwithstanding the effect of the Betting House Act in 1853, which, immediate as it was with regard to these betting offices, was partially neutralised by the change of location brought about when the new railways were beginning to convey large numbers at a moderate expense to the course, and by the laying on of the telegraph offering the means to others of rapid communication with the betting men at the race meetings, for gambling purposes, by those unable to make the journey. The time was one of transition, and legislators appear to have overlooked the fact that the miscellaneous booth gambling having been previously suppressed, their enactment putting an end to ready-money betting establishments, then chiefly in towns, would only result in their virtual transfer to every race-course and so-called club. There had been a great deal of irregular and surreptitious cash betting upon the race-course, but it was not a generally recognised system. It was one that had gradually grown. The bookmaker with a satchel taking money in advance and giving tickets, was unknown on our race-courses in the forties. Later on it was particularly recorded that at the Chester Cup race of 1852, one large bookmaker took a great many £5 notes, and the practice was then coming into fashion. It was, however, to laxity in applying the law that the ready-money, or deposit, system owed its subsequent continuation and increase in volume, for there is no doubt whatever that the Act of 1853 was considered at that time to apply to the evil in race-course enclosures as elsewhere. A recognised contemporary authority wrote: “The fatal facility induced by the open deposit system is nipped in the bud”; and another, “Cash betting stopped upon the passing of the Act.” The temptation, however, to race managers to wink at wholesale infraction of the law was very great. Entrance fees to the enclosures promised to become their financial backbone, and to enable them to add enormously to the value of the stakes and cups. And it was found that to permit ready-money betting was to turn a few score of entrance fees to the rings into thousands. That the practice was even many years afterwards considered illegitimate is shown by the Jockey Club notice in the _Racing