It is the desire of risk showing itself in the immature mind. As civilization went on and reason developed, the game of chance became a sport which had for its object a lucrative gain in some manner or other. It became gambling:--the risking of something valuable on the basis that the risk may prove profitable to the risker. The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport. It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public. It is our purpose to show that a gambling ring, backed by millions of dollars, headed by powerful men and strengthened by the support of the members of the Vice Trust, thrives in Chicago, adding one more stain to her already besmirched municipal escutcheon. It fattens on those men and women who have already been fleeced by the way of the social evil and on those who have not fallen victims to that sin, and whose besetting sin is gambling. RUIN, PRISON OR DEATH, THE GAMBLER'S END. Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors. The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality. The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. You cannot beat it, in the long run, no matter what your talents, judgment and experience may be. The average man or woman would stand a fair show of winning in the average gambling game in Chicago were that game "on the square." But it is not; the entire system is crooked. That is how its profits are enormous. The thousands of persons who play the handbooks during the day, the poker games and other forms of the gambling evil at night, have no more choice of emerging with the "long green" bulging from every pocket than has the mouse that is caught by the soft-pawed cat in a room and played with until tired and then killed. There is no escape. Everything is crooked and the gambling sucker is dubbed the "bleating sheep" the minute he enters where the chips rattle on the table or where the man with the dirty dollar smears your name on a chart with a stub pencil. Each year hundreds of men and women end their blasted lives after they have emerged from the dens of the gambling lords, robbed of their last cent and face to face with ruin, disgrace, and punishment.