Since professional gambling in a stock broker, a croupier, a bookmaker, or any other species involves some use of superior knowledge, trickery, or force, which in its effect on the "chance" amounts to "loading" the dice, the non-professional gambler necessarily finds himself a loser on any long series of events. These losses are found, in fact, to be a fruitful cause of crime, especially among the men employed in business where sums of money belonging to the firm are passing through their hands. It is not difficult for a man who constantly has in his possession considerable funds which he has collected for the employer to persuade himself that a temporary use of these funds, which otherwise lie idle, to help him over a brief emergency, is not an act of real dishonesty. He is commonly right in his plea that he had no direct intention to defraud his employer. He expected to be able to replace the sum before its withdrawal was discovered. But since legally a person must be presumed to "intend" that which is a natural or reasonable result of his action, an indirect intention to defraud must be ascribed to him. He is aware that his act is criminal as well as illegal in using the firm's money for any private purpose of his own. But in understanding and assessing the quality of guilt involved in such action, two circumstances which extenuate his act, though not the gambling habit which has induced it, must be taken into account. A poor man who frequently bets must sooner or later be cleared out and unable, out of his own resources, to meet his obligations. He is induced to yield to the temptation the more readily for two reasons. First, there is a genuine probability (not so large, however, as he thinks) that he can replace the money before any "harm is done." So long as he does replace it no harm appears to him to have been done; the firm has lost nothing by his action. HOW COMMERCE CONDONES CRIME. This narrower circumstance of extenuation is supported by a broader one. The whole theory of modern commercial enterprise involves using other people's money, getting the advantage of this use for one's self and paying to the owner as little as one can.