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SEES CHANGE IV PUBLIC SENTIMENT Writer in Trottia Publication Discusses Moral Aspect of Betting Question in Vigorous Way H J Kline has contributed to tUc American Horse Breeder an interesting article on betting from tbc moral standpoint It was printed under the caption Betting on Horse Kaces Not Immoral and is as follows followsNearly Nearly every writer on trotting horse topics has tit one time or another declared himself on the sub ¬ ject of betting on races 1 hare mislaid the tab Icuce cannot give the exact count but 1 am safe In raying that since John H Wallace first set himself up as a dictator and an able one too of the world of the trotting horse there have been few writers for the turf journals who have not declared in print that racing could survive without betting I have never a doubt that all of them believe the declara ¬ tion to be strictly all right I ask the pardon o every one of them for offering the suggestion that the survival will be marked by the loss of a great number of the greatest harness meetings now given and in addition to that loss the loss of a large number of the best buyers for harness horses which loss cannot be made up of recruits hence will be total and may deal breeding interests the worst blow they have ever attempted to sustain sustainI I have never wavered in the belief that betting on horse races while it may be declared illegal bs tvcry state in the Union is only lawdeclared Im ¬ morality As an Immoral proposition no one can convince me that it is the thing worthy the atten ¬ tion of the lawmaker In other words it is a mat ¬ ter to be left entirely to the discretion of the indi ¬ vidual I do not know that there is another person in the United States who will agree with me Nor Uo I care whether there Is I also have my own ideas as to bow race track betting should be con ¬ ducted and I also favor its control by the state Kentucky has tried state control on her running tracks and appears to have made a huge success of the job And that brings to the front this allimportant question Are the morals of the people of Kentucky any lower in tone than they were before race track betting was legalized under certain wise restric ¬ tions The only answer to that question is that they are not Massachusetts has enforced her antibetting laws against the race tracks for several years Is there a man in the Old Bay State who will endeavor to prove that such enforcement has improved the morals of the people of the commonwealth 4Xew York has enforced the laws adopted during the Hughes regime Yet since those laws were passed and during the time they have been enforced tbc metropolis has been shaken to its foundations by tbc disclosures concerning gambling and the scandal will not soon be forgotten The point I make is that the vast effort to prevent racetrack betting in the metropolitan district had no more effect on the moral tone of New York than if the reformers had sprin ¬ kled the streets with cologne water waterWe We have just passed through a campaign for the presidency of the Republic Up to the night of the flection there was wagered more mopey on that event than was ever bet in a single year on all tae rotting tracks of the United States I know of ouc place in the city of Cleveland where on the night of the election the amount wagered was greater than was wagered in any one day during the 1912 Grau l Circuit meeting More than that nearly every daily Iiaper in the city printed day by day the fluctua ¬ tions in the betting with never the slightest objec ¬ tion to such betting Not a soul in the community uttered a single note of protest What is true of Cleveland is true of every other city in the Union Kvery day the press dispatches gave the readers of all the big newspapers the Wall Street odds on the presidential race and not one of those papers printed a word to call attention to widespread violation of the laws If one onethousandth of the sum wagered in New York had been bet on a race at Gosben the minions of the law would have descended upon the unfortunate bettors and carted the whole bunch off to jaiL I call attention to these facts for the purpose of showing that our laws are making hypocrites of the wboie bunch of us And the facts further show that the laws of which I complain were hastily drawn adopted without due thought and where enforced are enforced by officials who might well be engaged in more valuable work for their constituents The saving clause for them is that the racetrack is a chining mark markIn In the State of Ohio the law under which race ¬ track betting may be suppressed has been invoked less than sir times in twenty years Where there has been one attempt to suppress there have been ten ttxnisaml neglects to attempt to suppress I might go on and enumerate thirty other states in which tbc same conditions exist But I feel that I have done enough The point I desire to drive home is that there Is not now nor has there ever liecn any more desire to suppress or prevent race ¬ track betting than there has been a desire to sup press betting on elections It Is true that legisla ¬ tures and governors have at one time and another wrought themselves up to a high pitch of alleged morality and wound up by putting the racetracks out of business But they have never done it in response to public demand For the matter is une with which the public has never concerned itsulf A vast majority of the voters of every state belong to the class called liberal hence it is usually but the noisy minority which clamors for the regulation 1 y law of the things which concern the individual only onlyYou You may disagreewith the proposition that the individual only is concerned and you may ask me if ihe matter is not one which may eat like a cancer into the body of society Granting that you have asked the question I will endeavor to answer it You see your banker at a Grand Circuit meeting and you observe that he has made more or less wagers Do you strike his name from your list or take your money out of his bank You see yonr grocer making an occasional wager Do vou for that reason seek a new place to trade You see the lead ¬ ing dry goods merchant in the betting ring Do you tell wife and daughters to go elsewhere for their winter outfits No indeed On the contrary if you have the right brand of blood in yonr system you say to yourself Those men are alive They are not sneaking up the back alley to shoot craps they come out in the open and do the thing men have been doing eve since prehistoric men rolled rocks down the hillside and wagered which would l e first to beach the bottom For the simple reason that those men are doing society no possible barm you accept their actions as unworthy of criticism and you do precisely as they do If they were arrested on a warrant sworn out under one of the foolish laws which made illegal that which they did and you were selected as one of the jury to try them it is a dollar to a flyspeck you would stick forever guiltyFive against a verdict of guilty Five young men all honest lawabiding home loving sat in the grandstand at one of the 1912 Grand Circuit meetings and made a blind pool on every beat that was trotted or paced The cost to each one was 2 for each heat Down in the ring 1100 men did the same thing at the same cost for ach man I am told that both were in violation oC the law of the state in which the race meeting was lield Do you think for an instant that if some nosing reformer had caused the arrest of the five young uitn he ever conld have secured a conviction Not in a thousand years Why Because there are jiot twelve men in that stale who could be brought together on one jury who arc so rampantly virtu ¬ ous as to vote for conviction It is a case of public Kentiment What might happen to the men who held the money down in the betting ring had they been arrested I am not prepared to say But the point I make is that their offense was no greater than was that of one of the young men who held the hat for the frequent drawings of the blind pool up in the grandstand And neither committed an offense against the morals or the welfare of society Both violated a law which some thoughtless men put on the statute books years ago and which most of the people of the state have ever since treated with the contempt it so justly deserves deservesI I have always clung to the oldfashioned notion that laws should be enacted for the benefit of all the iicople I have never been much in favor of paternal legislation though there are many matters which annot well be handled without dipping somewhat into paternalism But the freedom of the individual as long as be does not do that which harms society should always be held sacred More than that I liclicvc much of the socalled moral legislation is titter nonsense And nearly all of It is the result of tlie ronstant agitation carried on by those who have nothing better to do and who make lawmakers Jtplieve ther can muster sufficient votes at the next flection to put them out of office officeFour Four years ago one of the states in the middle west was on the verge apparently of adopting one of the most drastic pieces of socalled reform legis ¬ lation Only the most adroit political scheming on the part of the party out of power prevented it Today that state is at the other end of the earth as far as that particular brand of legislation is con ¬ cerned and is in rbsolute possession of the party which though out of power prevented its adoption Th situation four years ago grew out of the fear created by a few busy talkers The situation today in largely the reflection of tbe sober sense of the majority The former leader of the outs will soon become viceprcsidrnt of the United States StatesThose Those who believe as1 I believe can control the Kituation as to race track betting if we go nbout it in the right way The trouble most always has bwn that we have been afraid to assert ourselves We liave been to ready to take it for granted that we are favoring something that is of itself wrong We have made the mistake of allowing ourselves to be put on the defensive We represent just as high a grade of morality as any reform league that ever eras organized The difference between us and those organizations is that they shout their alleged virtues from the housetops housetopsI I have an idea that there is coming about in the nation a gradual but great change in public senti ¬ ment I will never believe until a test is made on a referendum vote in every state that a majority of our people believe that they are better from the real moral viewpoint than are the people of France Germany Austria and Russia We will all admit if we stop a moment to reflect that the people of those nations do a great many things better than we do them Are we then to insist that in handling the matter of race track betting we are I wiser than they At all events they hare adopted regulations to which they steadfastly adhere while most of our states have adopted regulations to which they pay no attention save in rare instances and those instances do not occur through the demand of any great number of people peopleIn In other words the handling of race tracks is done sensibly abroad while in the United States it is done as if it had all along been in tbe hands of children who most of the time bad more interesting things to think about
