[To TIER EDITOR or TEl " SPECTATOR:1 SIE,—The attempt to
drag political economy into the con- troversy on the subject of gambling is only another instance of how ready one section of society is to saddle this science with obligations which it is not called on to acknowledge. If it could be proved that money won in gambling was necessarily squandered on luxuries by the winner, the appeal to political economy would be to a certain extent justifiable. This, however, does not seem to be the meaning of your correspondent, who 4‘ rules gambling out of court" as being "a case of unproduc- tive expenditure." The analogy suggested between gambling and the breaking of a pane of glass is eminently fallacious. It is a platitude of political economy that the latter proceeding is not "good for trade." But the community is no more a loser when A pays B 21,000 which he has lost to him at cards, than when C pays D 21,000 for an old copy of Shakespeare, or X gives Y this sum. The money has only changed hands in all three cases ; the transaction does not represent the annihilation of so much capital; the labour expended on the creation of this amount of capital is not rendered unproductive by the fact that it is to be used as B and not as A pleases ; B may make as good a use of the money as A would have done. The introduction of the question, how far the expenditure of money on such apparently unproductive objects as floral fetes and balloon ascents is justifiable, seems further to confuse the issue which the opponents and defenders of gambling are fighting out. In a game of cards, the pleasure is obtained without any appreciable expenditure of labour, and so it is beside the point to consider how far labour which is only produc- tive of pleasure involves a loss to the community. Flower fetes, gambling, and the breaking of windows may be laudable or criminal forms of entertainment, but between them, political economy can see little or no analogy. Even the hypothetical boy who wins other people's money by his skill at billiards, must be acquitted on the indictment as drawn by your corre- spondent, though he may be condemned by political economy on the charge of injuring the community by diminishing the amount of productive labour which ought to be at its service. If political economy is the only armoury which can furnish a weapon of sufficient keenness with which to assail gambling, we need no longer wonder that the gambler has received so much indulgence and sympathy from society.—I am, Sir, &c.,
W. W. V.
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