And so things went on for ten years longer, until the scandal was too grievous to be borne, and a Select Committee sat in Parliament, in 1844, on the subject of gaming. This was principally brought about by the revelations in the case of _Smith_ v. _Bond_, which was tried before Lord Abinger and a special jury at the Middlesex Sittings after Michaelmas Term, 1842. It was a common gaming-house case brought under the statute of Anne (9th, c. 14), which was enacted to repress excessive gaming. The parish of St George’s, Hanover Square, swarmed with hells, and the efforts of the parish officers had hitherto been unable to put them down. The play at such houses was notoriously unfair, and the keepers had thriven in proportion to the number and wealth of the victims they had been able to fleece. It was therefore resolved to bring an action under this statute, which not only prohibits excessive gaming, but enables the loser of above £10 at a sitting, to recover treble the amount of his losses; or, if he does not choose to take this course himself, any informer is enabled to sue for and obtain the penalty, one half of which is to benefit the poor of the parish in which the offence was committed, and the other half is to go to the person bringing the action. In the case tried before Lord Abinger, the gaming-house went by the name of the Minor St James’s Club-house; but there was not the least pretence for calling it a club; anybody went there to play with hardly the formality of a first introduction. The keepers did a thriving trade, at French Hazard chiefly, and it was proved by the plaintiff, who had been one of the coterie who kept the table, that Mr Bredell had lost £200, Mr Fitzroy Stanhope £50, the Marquis of Conyngham £500 on each of two separate occasions, Lord Cantalupe £400, and other noblemen and gentlemen various sums. An ingenious plea was put in by counsel on behalf of Bond, the keeper of the so-called club, that the sums in question were paid by cheques, and as a cheque is not held to be a payment in law until cashed, and as the banks at which the cheques were payable were not in the parish of St George’s, Hanover Square, the offence was not completed in that parish, and the plaintiff could not recover. The Chief Baron overruled the objection, and under his direction the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff for £3508, being treble the amount actually proved to have been lost, thus teaching a very useful lesson to the keepers of gaming-houses generally. Had Lords Conyngham and Cantalupe and Mr Stanhope come forward as witnesses, and certified to their losses on the two occasions mentioned, additional penalties would have accrued to the amount of £5820.