extravagance their victims plunged," as if their money was immortal.
In the early clays of California gambling was but a more direct expression of the spirit of speedy accumulation manifest in common and in so-called legitimate speculation. Mining, merchandising, real estate operations in those days of uncertainty were all species of gambling. The coming hither in the first instance was but a staking of time, energy, and health against the hidden treasures of the Sierra.
The origin of this vice must be sought in the unsounded depths of turbid human nature ; its practice dates back to the remotest past. Thousands of years before the coming of Europeans to these shores gaming was the chief delight of the inhabitants. The gentle savage would stake on some aboriginal game of chance or skill his shell-money, his peltries, his hunting and household implements, his wives, with an outward indifference as to the results that in 1849 would have made him the envy of the subtlest and skilfullest faro dealer of the day. Losing all else he would throw himself, his liberty into the pot, and losing this he would march off, the naked slave of the winner, with a stoicism most pleasing to behold. The European with all his superior mechanism of mind, his culture and philosophy, has never been able to outdo the childlike and passionate wild man in those qualities of skill and self-command essential to success in this fascinating calling.
From what Horace tells us it appears that the vice was not prohibited by the Romans on account of its demoralizing tendency, but because it diverted the youths from manly sports and made them effeminate. And so in later times, and among other peoples, it was not so much the rioting^ and drunkenness and murders it led to, as the blow it aimed at the moral ideal of the nation, that made it offensive. In early times the ethical ideal was patriotism; and as gaming
