People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1894 — What Gambling Is. [ARTICLE]

What Gambling Is.

Wagering, us such, involves necessarily no element inconsistent with the best citizenship or the most exalted sanctity. It makes no difference to the essential features of the act whether it is done by Moses or Josue in the distribution of the Promisee Land, by a modern board of church trustees in providing against the chances of loss by fire, or, to go a little farther, by a professional gambler who sells pools on a race. The essential features are always the same. Hence it would seem that in a generic sense gambling or wagering or betting, or by whatever name the transaction in which a valuable “thing” is staked to become the property of a party to the contract on the determination of a future and

uncertain event. But usage, in this our day and generation, and with the people among whom we live and move and have our being, has attached to the w r ord “gambling” a different sense from that which it had in the begining. “Gambling” specifically represents not only the idea of disposing of property by wager contract, but also the additional idea of success. It calls up the idea thriftlessness, of vice, of ruin of the moral character. —Rev. T. A. Hendrick in Donahoe’s for March.