Even a moral order imposed in the public interest, if too uniform and rigorous, will arouse, not merely in bad but in good natures, reactions towards lawlessness. There is much truth in what Charles Lamb wrote of his interest in the Seventeenth Century Comedy:— I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses where the hunter cannot follow me—I am back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. So it is with all sorts and conditions of men: the incalculable, the lawless remains an ineradicable factor in life. Where there is little or no provision of or stimulus to art, the crudest and most sensational play tends to absorb the entire margin of energy left after work is done. In such a state of society every field of activity capable of generating such elements of hazard is pressed into the service of gambling: sports and business occupations become popular in proportion as they can by their structure be made to minister to the craving for hazard; every sort of competition where a sufficient element of the incalculable exists is pervaded by gambling. If the monotony of toil drives large numbers of workers to seek violent sensational relief in gambling, the ennui of idleness prompts the leisured classes to the same abuse. A totally or partially parasitic life (where little or no socially directed labour is imposed), though leaving a large margin of free energy, makes more for dilettantism than for art, and depriving play of its healthy interest as a relief from work induces a “boredom” which fosters gambling among other sensational extravagances. Moreover in the rich, leisured class the disproportion between earning and spending loosens the just sense of property more than in any other class, so that large miraculous transfers of property by betting seem less discrepant with the ordinary conditions of their life. This line of diagnosis makes it quite apparent what are the real supports of gambling, and how the vice inheres in the wider “social problem,” only to be cured or abated in proportion as sounder general conditions of social order are obtained. When we regard the actual life of an ordinary worker in a factory town we can easily understand the attraction of “betting.” It is hard to refuse sympathy to the factory “hand” or clerk who occasionally puts his “shilling” on a horse, going through his weary day’s work with the zest of expectancy and hope afforded by his speculation. It gives him a topic of conversation in the intervals of his work, and is for him a sort of “politics” in leisure hours: into his dull life it introduces an element of romance.