This, like all other backward steps to a lower stage of moral effort, is easy. For social conduct is the inheritance of complicated experiences, retained only by sleepless vigilance, and exercised by the subordination of the individual will to the social conscience. It is therefore comparable to those high forms of chemical compounds built up of many atoms but exceedingly unstable. The simple presence of a disturbing element shatters the compound and reduces it to its primitive atoms. Man’s self-regarding and primitive instincts are constantly threatening to disjoint his social character and defeat all movements depending upon that character for their success. To hope, for instance, that a labour party can be built up in a population quivering from an indulgence in games of hazard is folly. Such a population cannot be organised for sustained political effort, cannot be depended upon for legal support to its political champions, cannot respond to appeals to its rational imagination. Its hazards absorb so much of its leisure; they lead it away from thoughts of social righteousness; they destroy in it the sense of social service; they create in it a state of mind which believes in fate, luck, the irrational, the erratic; they dazzle its eyes with flashing hopes; they make it, in other words, absolutely incapable of taking an interest in the methods and the aims of reforming politicians. They lay it open to the seductions of the demagogue, to the blandishments of the hail-fellow-well-met type of candidate, to the inducements of the common briber, to the flashy clap-trap of the vulgar and the ignorant charlatan. And the discovery that such classes exist in the community will very soon be made, and the whole tone of public life lowered to suit their tastes. It is not without serious significance that in recent elections one of the most common forms of argument (sometimes used by both sides) has been an offer by the candidates to back up statements they had made by sums of money. “It is not so much,” says Loria, the eminent Italian sociologist, “the personality of the elected as the character of the class which elects that really counts.” I do not say that this is to lead to rapid and irretrievable ruin. Rome bore the burden of a luxurious and gambling class of citizens for centuries. But I do say that the spread of the gambling habit is one of the most disquieting events of the time for those particularly who believe in self-government and in an intelligent democracy using its political power to secure moral and social ends. Every labour leader I know recognises the gambling spirit as a menace to any form of labour party. III I have, finally, to consider what good citizenship has to say to gambling, and how it proposes to deal with the matter.