17. On the Casino Terrace

I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps to
keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.

Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks are
not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables.
Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-day
at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and
thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether
unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any
town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces
which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of
roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste,
by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity,
and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a
brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and
belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the
gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modest
tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the
oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap
a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the
gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!

For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make
about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If
they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it!
Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror.
But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they
raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail--in order to feel
their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and
the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way--do
I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow
resources of The Garret, Grub Street?--it is but a skin-deep surface
symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London
and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and
Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.

"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the
supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial
objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is
attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men
are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the
sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is
only to the _kind_ of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at
which you stand a