So widespread has been the zest for gambling among whole races as widely different in character and environment as the British, the Zulu, the Chinese, that we are almost driven to seek some physiological root for the passion. To give an added weight of interest to chance by attaching to it a transfer of property seems to imply a love of hazard as a permanent feature in humanity. Though the transfer of property by gambling not merely feeds the passion but imports grave moral injuries of its own, it cannot be said to originate gambling or to be essential to the play of the interest in chance or hazard. The folly and the social injury of gambling grow with the proportion of the stakes; but high stakes, while they concentrate and dramatise the play, do not create the interest. Educationalists and other reformers who would exorcise the gambling habit must look deeper for its origin and early sustenance. The fevered excitement of the gambler is part of an exaggerated reaction against certain excesses of orderly routine imposed upon the life in which he lives. The dull, prolonged monotony of uninteresting drudgery which constitutes the normal workaday life of large masses of people drives them to sensational reactions which are crude and violent. The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. Their work affords no considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression, and the interest, achievement, and surprise which are ordinary human qualities. It is easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however well-ordered) human life would be vacant of interest and intolerable: in other words, it is a prime condition of humanity that the unexpected in the form of happening and achievement should be adequately represented in every life. Art in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, and play, as interested but unproductive effort, are essential. But where either the physical or mental exhaustion of industry, or other external conditions, prevent the due cultivation or the expression of wholesome art or play instincts, baser attractions usurp their place. It is impossible, and it would be undesirable, to deny to man the satisfaction of his instinctive zest in the unexpected, the hazardous, the disorderly: he needs not only achievement but accident to sustain his interest in life. The latter factor may yield largely to the former in highly civilised man, in a society where varied modes of art offer varied stimuli to self-expression and achievement: the artist who is a true artist is least likely to be a gambler. But a margin of disorder, or hazard and unreason, will always remain a factor in the interest of life: hence an element of unordered play as distinct from art will always survive.