The gambling disease is marked by a moral and intellectual unsettlement, by an impatience with the slow processes of legitimate accumulation, by a revolt against the discipline of steady growth and sustained action. The gambler lives in a state of unnatural strain. Like an insane person, he stands on the threshold of a grandiose world the high lights of which throw the sober realities of the real into shadow. Moreover, his vice develops the self-regarding instincts into hideous and criminal proportions. What is all this but saying that it cuts away the roots of good citizenship. For good citizenship depends upon a moral discipline which enables a man to pursue, undisturbed by outward event, calm amidst storms of fortune, some desirable social end; it is dependent upon the development of the social conscience in the individual; it flourishes only when men seek after the more solid gains which come from honest work and faithful endeavour. The people to whom the gains of life are but the prize-winnings of a game of hazard, who flock to spectacles, whose sports consist of looking on whilst professionals display their prowess, are but decaying props of State. Individualists would make us believe that citizenship is not part of personality, for otherwise their antithesis of man _versus_ the State would be inconceivable. But the antithesis is purely verbal, and does not in reality exist. Man’s personality is complex, but it is a unit; his public and private actions may be many sided, and for a time may spring from opposing moral sources, but in the end their exercise blends the opposing sources and changes the individuality. For instance, no people can rule itself democratically at home and govern other peoples autocratically abroad. The home democracy in time becomes tainted. The moral sources of one system become blended with the polluted sources of the other. And so it is with the character of the man and the citizen. The citizen cannot act contrary to the man. One need hardly trouble to appeal to history to prove these statements. A parallel between our present state of society, rotting with luxury and intoxicated with excitement, and the Roman Empire in the days of its decline is on every moralist’s lips and is becoming hackneyed. Philip of Macedon, it is said, encouraged gambling amongst the Greeks, on the ground that it corrupted their minds and made them docile under his rule. From time to time in our own country the gambling mania has become chronic, the last of these outbursts being about a century ago, when Brooke’s and White’s stripped their foolish victims, and when the flick of cards was heard throughout the abodes of fashion. Of that time Sir George Trevelyan writes:—