WOMEN AND COMMERCIAL GAMBLING.
CHICAGO has been the first place, apparently, to provide regular accommodation for those women who gain their livelihood by speculating on the rise or fall in the cost of pro- visions. There, if we may trust the reporters, there is a regular place set aside for the resort of women so engaged. It is not a Stock Exchange, but a Provision Dealers' Exchange. One lady is said to have made 21,600 sterling on "the Corn Corner" of January. Another has "planked her bottom dollar" on the May wheat ; a third is speculating deeply in pork, and in "futures in hog-products." The reporters say that this occu- pation has a curious effect on the countenances of the women who frequent this Exchange. They lose the mobility of feature and expression which is one of the great charms of women, and don the mask of impenetrability peculiar to the man of business whose great object it is never to betray for a moment how things are going with him. Now, so far as we know, there is no reason whatever, except the prepossessions of the existing Committees of the various Exchanges of Europe and the West, why women should not be admitted freely to all these Exchanges ; and it is pretty certain that, at a time when the legal restrictions which exclude them from other professions are being one by one removed, no legal restriction to exclude them from this profes- sion is likely to be imposed. If; therefore, women are not to embrace these speculative careers as freely as they will, doubt- less, embrace before long law and medicine and soberer com- mercial pursuits, it must be their own choice which is to prevent them, and not any permanent external obstacle which it is out of their own power to overcome. If women as a rule think fit to engage in speculative businesses, women will before long undoubtedly be allowed to engage in them almost as much as they please, and to speculate as freely as they please in "the futures of hog-products," or in the liveliness or droopingness of "Scotch pig." Nothing but their own resolve is at all likely
to deter them from the least suitable of all careers except, perhaps, that of a soldier—and we are not quite sure that even that would injure the feminine beauty of their characters so much,—upon which they could contrive to enter.
For this very reason we are disposed to press upon women the question whether they themselves are prepared to regard all careers which do not involve great physical daring as equally suit- able for women. The late Lord Beaconsfield has told us what he thought of speculative women in the clever little sketch of "Lady Bertie and Bellair," who pretends to wish to go on a. pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but is really plunged heart and soul in railroad speculation, and who faints on hearing that "the narrow gauge has won." Lord Beaconsfield's verdict,—delivered, as usual, through his favourite oracle, Sidonia,—is, "She pesters me with her letters, but I do not like feminine finance ;" and perhaps there was more reason for this judgment than there was for most of Mr. Disra,eli's epigrammatic and sententious decisions. Undoubtedly, of all careers which are likely to unsex women, that of staking considerable stakes on the re- sults of a complicated series of dubious commercial events seems to us the most likely to produce that effect. Im- personal excitements which depend for their interest on heavy pecuniary risks, can hardly be really good for any human being. But if they must be undergone by any human being at all, certainly they do least harm to those who have the least susceptibility to finer feelings, who are most impersonal in the whole attitude of their mind, who are nearest to intellectual engines and furthest removed from the life of the affections. We have known many men who could run great pecuniary risks with little or no disturbance of their best personal life,—and. in deprecating these gambling com- mercial pursuits as morally dangerous, we must not be under- stood to express any doubt that the equalisation of prices which results from calm and wise speculation on a sound basis of capital in the upward or downward movements of stocks and commodities, is of great advantage to the world,— but the present writer, at least, has never known a woman to whom it would have been reasonable to attribute the same im- perturbability. Nor do we think that if such a woman existed, she could be, in the best sense of the term, feminine. A true woman is utterly vulgarised by having her highest excitements and preoccupations not merely removed from the personal to the purely impersonal world, but made dependent on doubtful events containing a large element of chance. That which is beat and finest in women will not stand the wear-and-tear of this kind of life; and though that is true of most men also, it is not so true, and will never be so true, in their ease, as it is in that of women. The corruption of the higher type, as was long ago observed, is almost always a worse corruption than the corruption of the lower. Now, women's sensitiveness of perception and liveliness of affection, and that delicacy of tact which arises from sensitive perceptions and lively affections, form unquestionably a much larger proportional part of their whole nature than the same elements form of men's. And as the excitements of commercial gambling,—i.e., of speculation on the risks and chances of com- merce,—undoubtedly blunt that sort of sensitiveness and affec- tionateness and tact, it does much more harm to women than it does to men. And yet in unsexing them, it bestows upon them nothing of the better masculine life, for we do not count a little addition to the power of wearing a mask through ordinary chances and changes, one of the better aspects of masculine life. Just conceive what the Turf would become, if women were the chief managers of all its tricks and rascalities ! Imagine what a woman acting as Mr. Trollope made Major Tufto act in "The Duke's Children" must become ! The bare imagination is almost enough to demonstrate the hopeless ruin which gambling must bring on what is noblest in women. It is true, of course, that in deal- ing with what may be a perfectly legitimate and useful profession, —the making of large investments in commodities or stocks, on the strength of indications as to the changing needs of the public,— the gambling is not so demoralising as it is in cases where the sole and only effect is to drain money out of other people's pockets into your own. But it is gambling still, and the excitements of gambling are so preoccupying, so prejudicial to the healthy exercise of all the more human parts of our nature, that it should never be pursued by any one without a very cool head, and a very great power of limiting by the exertion of a strong will the risks to which he exposes his fortunes and the fortunes of those dearest to him. We believe that what may be called the refining influences of life can never be wielded by one
whose eye is ever on the compass and his hand ever on the wheel, to prevent the ship from striking on a reef, or turn- ing her beam to a heavy sea. You cannot be thinking of the little kindnesses of life, of the slight indications that others are happy or unhappy, that this change would make a house brighter, that that would make it more home-like, if your whole mind is concentrated on the risks which you are running by a great speculative transaction in shares or goods. A mind without oppressive impersonal preoccupations is essential for those personal amenities for which we all look to women. And, there- fore, women,—who can, almost always, do more to make others at their ease and happy and gentle than men ma—should, in our opinion, never bide their gifts under a bushel by assuming the blunting and hardening career of a commercial speculator. We say this even of those cases of commercial speculation which are quite legitimate,—tbe cases where the speculator has an ample capital, does not risk more than he can afford, acts upon scientific calculations and indications of the movements of affairs, and really confers on the com- munity the benefit of equalising prices by raising them when they are too low, and lowering them when they are arti- ficially high. Undoubtedly, there are very few women who coda really observe these limits so as to confer a great good on the community, while even those few would necessarily thereby sacrifice a great proportion of their best private influence. But we do not lay so much stress on the rarity of these women, because undoubtedly this is partly because women have had so little discipline in the calculations of risk, and of course they might acquire that discipline in a few generations. We put it on the much stronger ground that if they did acquire that discipline, they would deprive human life of a great deal more that is good than they can ever add to it by doing the heavy and. blunting work of the Stock Exchange, or the other Exchanges of the world. You cannot at one and the same time be speculating heavily for a rise, and making the life of a home brighter and purer than it would otherwise be. It takes a great deal of self- command, a great deal of tenacity, a great deal of calcu- lation, a great deal of careful reflection, observation, and strenuousness, to do any speculative business on which the for- tunes of your house depend, with judgment and sobriety. All this means the expenditure of a great deal of vitality, and the draining of that vitality from a sphere in which it can be made to contribute vastly to the refinement, the graciousness, the goodness, the sweetness, and the harmony of life. If women are prepared to draw off their life from their own special sphere, and invest it in a hard calculating forethought and an indomitable volition, we can only say that they are prepared to inflict a great misfortune on the world. Let all kinds of life be as free to women as to men. But at least let them exercise their freedom with equal regard to the qualities in which they are strongest, and by which they can contribute most to the refining of human character. We think we may safely say, that amongst these strongest qualities women would not find in one case in a million those which specially suit the possessor of them for a life of sober and reticent speculation, and in that one case in a million would probably find also brighter qualities which must be suppressed, or at least, allowed to rest unused, if the former are to be put to the highest use.
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