_The Gambler Paranoiac_.--A form of paranoia that inflicts almost more of human suffering on the friends of the patient than any other is that in which the sufferer is possessed of the idea that he can, by luck or by ingenious combinations, succeed in winning money at gambling. Milder forms of this paranoia are so common that it is the custom not to think of even the severer forms of the gambling mania as a manifestation of irrational mentality. When a man thinks, however, that he can beat a gambler at his own game, or when by long lucubration he comes to the conclusion that he has invented a system by which he can beat a roulette wheel, he is, on this subject at least, as little responsible as the man who thinks that he has discovered perpetual motion. This form of paranoia inflicts suffering mainly on the near relatives of the patient. There is no doubt that when extreme manifestation of the gambling mania becomes evident, patients should be legally restrained from further foolishness. One difficulty with regard to the proper appreciation of gambling has been an unfortunate tendency to class gambling among the malicious actions. There are many people for whom only two sins seem to have any special importance, drunkenness and gambling. As a rule, there is not the least spirit of malice in the ordinary gambler; not meaning, of course, by this the sharpers, who try to make money at the expense of others, but the man who believes that, somehow, chance and fate are going to conspire to enrich him at the expense of others, though it must be confessed that he does not usually even think of this latter part of the proposition which he accepts so readily. We have had in recent times so many manifestations of the practical universality of the gambling spirit, the belief by people that brokers and banking concerns are ready to make them rich quick, that we have in it perhaps the best illustration of the partial truth of the proposition that "half the world is off, and the other half not quite on."