_(f) Gambling Clubs._—Habitual gambling in the social clubs of wealthy Englishmen has led to a very anomalous state of the law and of its application. It is not worth while to go further back than the case of _Downes_ v. _Johnson_ (Albert Club) to illustrate this. There was no serious dispute as to this not being a betting club, or that the purpose of its existence was not betting. No reasonable person could for a moment doubt that if betting were stopped the club would collapse, and the police authorities in 1895 made an attempt to bring about this result. They had good reason for knowing the evil arising from it. That provisions could be obtained, and were consumed in considerable quantities, was shown; but any serious contention that such a club was a social club would be dispelled by a visit to the premises, in an obscure court turning out of Fleet Street. The judges, however, appeared to be hampered by a desire to shield private betting, and the judgment remains the charter for organised house betting under the protection of the name of club. There are several other such large institutions in London and elsewhere (besides innumerable smaller ones), the chief of those in the metropolis being notorious gambling centres, where settling day is carried on in the same business-like way as on the Stock Exchange. They all owe their continued existence to the reluctance of the Courts and Parliament to deal with the card and Turf gambling which goes on at the well-to-do clubs, and thousands of gambling centres all over the country are shielded by this unhappy partiality. The above decision may be said to have broken up any efficiency of existing legislation, and so pernicious has its effect been that a very modest attempt to reduce the number of the poorer class institutions was at last introduced as a makeshift in the Licensing Act for the registration of clubs, which came into force on January 1, 1903. It is true that it only applies to clubs selling liquor, but as betting men are almost invariably drinkers it is probably comprehensive in this sense. Its inefficiency was illustrated last May by a decision of Mr. Justice Bucknill, by no means a lover of betting men, who presumably considers himself bound by former decisions. The judge must have known the extreme difficulty of the police getting evidence at all, and that it probably could not be got except by the raid, which he approved, and that a second raid after such a warning would almost inevitably be abortive. Yet, although systematic betting was proved, he ruled that it was not illegal, although it might have been so if it had been shown to go on day after day. The false protection extended to the race-course rings by the Powell-Kempton Park case would be incomplete if it were not to cover the betting clubs, and no branch of the gaming laws is more defective than with regard to these latter.