Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/714

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

banks as though owned by the person who keeps the table.' The justice, in concluding his opinion, says, 'the coincidence existing between the game of lansquenet, expressly classed by the statute in the list of banking games, and the game in question, rondo, compels me to decide by the rule of construction which the statute gives—rondo is a banking game." Now we agree perfectly with Justice Jenks. If lansquenet is a banking game, so is rondo. They are precisely similar, although one is played with cards and the other with balls. The banks in both are made by outsiders. The table-keepers in both games have no interest except in the percentage, and in playing either game, it is not necessary that the person who makes the banks should participate in either drawing the cards from the box or rolling the balls into a pocket. It was cleffrly the manifest intention of our lawmakers to put an end to all kinds of gamblino- in our state: and althouo-h the word rondo does not appear among the proscribed games in the law of last winter, we are clearly of the opinion that it is proscribed by that law."

From the time of the gold discovery, which made all around of the roseate hue, there was an openness in all kinds of wickedness, a dash and abandon quite refreshing. Perhaps they play as heavily at the London gaming houses, and at the German springs, but the charm and freshness of unhackneyed nature is not there. In London, or even at the German springs, one would not often see a Sydney convict, a clergyman not three months from his preaching, a Harvard graduate, a Pennsylvania farmer, and a New York newsboy all betting at the same table at the same time.

In California gambling there is little attempt at that quasi-respectability, or, more plainly speaking, humbug, with which the lovers of a money hazard would fain gloss over their whist, chess, or horse