To every young man who indulges in the least form of gambling, I raise a warning voice! Under the specious name of AMUSEMENT, you are laying the foundation of gambling. Playing is the seed which comes up gambling. It is the light wind which brings up the storm. It is the white frost which preludes the winter. You are mistaken, however, in supposing that it is harmless in its earliest beginnings. Its terrible blight belongs, doubtless, to a later stage; but its consumption of time, its destruction of industry, its distaste for the calmer pleasures of life, belong to the very _beginning_. You will begin to play with every generous feeling. Amusement will be the plea. At the beginning the game will excite enthusiasm, pride of skill, the love of mastery, and the love of money. The love of money, at first almost imperceptible, at last will rule out all the rest,--like Aaron's rod,--a serpent, swallowing every other serpent. Generosity, enthusiasm, pride and skill, love of mastery, will be absorbed in one mighty feeling,--the savage lust of lucre. There is a downward climax in this sin. The opening and ending are fatally connected, and drawn toward each other with almost irresistible attraction. If gambling is a vortex, playing is the outer ring of the Maelstrom. The thousand pound stake, the whole estate put up on a game--what are these but the instruments of kindling that tremendous excitement which a diseased heart craves? What is the _amusement_ for which you play but the _excitement_ of the game? And for what but this does the jaded gambler play? You differ from him only in the degree of the same feeling. Do not solace yourself that you shall escape because others have; for they _stopped_, and _you go on_. Are you as safe as they, when you are in the gulf-stream of perdition, and they on the shore? But have you ever asked, _how many_ have escaped? Not one in a thousand is left unblighted! You have nine hundred and ninety-nine chances _against_ you, and one for you; and will you go on? If a disease should stalk through the town, devouring whole families, and sparing not one in five hundred, would you lie down under it quietly because you have one chance in five hundred? Had a scorpion stung you, would it alleviate your pangs to reflect that you had only one chance in one hundred? Had you swallowed corrosive poison, would it ease your convulsions to think there was only one chance in fifty for you? I do not call every man who plays a gambler, but a gambler in _embryo_. Let me trace your course from the amusement of innocent playing to its almost inevitable end.