LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

SAXON-LES-BAINS : A STUDY IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GAMBLING.

(To Teil EDITOR Or MN "SPECTATOR]

have always taken a strong psychological interest in the subject of gambling, but belonging as I do to one of those at once prudent and virtuous circles, in which even large risks at Christ- mas games are sternly disapproved, and never having had the in- clination to form the acquaintance of gambling men for the sake of the few experiments I was inclined to make, I determined that before the public gaining establishments of Europe entirely dis- appeared, I would lose a few pounds at one of them, in order to gratify my curiosity as to the nature and incidents of the passion. I have never regarded ordinary games of cards, how- ever highly weighted by the element of chance, as good sub- jects of the experiment. Human nature, so far as I am acquainted with it, is curiously and perversely imbued with the habit of taking full credit for any success in which it is possible to discern or imagine a voluntary element, and of letting the element of pure chance fall into the background of the mind. It is true that a loser will, in speaking to others of his losses, always dwell on his ill-luck, just as one catches at almost any excuse for a blunder, rather than refer it to one's own blundering habit of mind. But I have always observed that in ordinary games of mixed chance and skill one thinks better of oneself for winning and worse for losing, if one examines one's real state of mind without reference to others. I was therefore anxious to see the condition of mind which would accompany games of unmixed chance.

Either my evil or good star delayed my experiment till Spa, Baden-Baden, Homburg, and all the more luxurious of the public gaming-places were clow2d. Monaco was out of my reach for the time. Saxon-lea-Bains, in the Valais, was the only public gaming- place within the possibilities of the case. And as I happened to be travelling with a highly estimable party, none of whom were in the least likely to be betrayed into a permanent passion for gambling, I resolved—strongly, I must admit, against the counsel of my prudent wife, who regarded the notion that there was any psychological gain to be made out of gambling as pr.re moonshine, and looked upon my notion as only a wilful man's caprice for burning a bigger hole in his pocket than was at all needful,—to pay a short visit to Saxon-lea-Bains, and risk, or rather lose,—for I was well aware I should really lose,—five pounds there. Saxon-les-Bains is, as you probably know, a little, desolate place, in the Rhone Valley, not far from Martigny, where tourists descend from the pass of the Col de Bahne between Chamounix and the Rhone. It is at the foot of a picturesquely pointed mountain called the Pierre-I-Voir (probably because no one goes to see it., at least any closer than they see it from the valley, the gambling tables of Saxon quite overpowering scenery in the minds of gamblers, and repelling all tourists who are not gamblingly inclined). The somewhat narrow and flat valley of the Rhone is here locked in on both aides by vast and barren mountains, which seem so close to each other, that in the twilight I have often mistaken the side of a mountain, really half a mile or more distant, for the towering wall of a houseclose by. Consequently the air of the place is close. The sultry sun beats back from the barren face of the mountains till Saxon is like a hothouse. The

marshes of the Rhone moreover, produce a most bloodthirsty gnat, which at sunset begins the most violent attacks on all human beings who are not already inoculated with its poison.

And unhappy are they who cannot sleep in the too often small and close rooms of the hotels without a window open to the outer air, for in that case it is most probable that they will not sleep.

at all, but will hear the war-trumpets of these threatening and venomous little creatures sounding the reveal& all night long. Add to this that Saxon is distinguished for a complexity of un- wholesome smells which would be remarkable even in: an old German town, that the cookery is rather coarse and not very • clean, that bands of music and still noisier bands of revellers, con- sisting of the ladies'-maids of the fair gamblers, and of not very • refined admirers of theirs, make sleep impossible before mid- night at least, even to those who can succeed in excluding the- gnats, and you have a condition of things which certainly worke together with the feverish love of play to prevent any too early departure from the green-baize tables and the ring of the raked-up. and distributed coin.

A friend of mine who was not with us, but who had had many weeks' experience at Monaco, had communicated a little plan for an all but moral certainty of winning, which was founded on the most scientific principles, but the only defect of which was that the banks give one no conceivable means of carrying it into practice,—a defect which, indeed, I believe he himself had verified by leaving Monaco a loser, in, spite of his scientific plan. His idea was this. It is obvious that even where,—say at roulette,—the chance of the next "odd" or " even " is precisely one in two, or one-half, the- chance of a run of any given eight results, in a specified order, —such as odd, odd, even, odd, odd, even, even, even,—will be onlyonein2 x2x2x2x2x 2x 2x 2,oronein 256- If, then, my friend bethought himself, you could but steadily stake your money so as to stake it against the arrival of this highly improbable compound event, you would be sure to win. I quite-

agreed in this extremely sagacious principle, but the difficulty unfortunately was in the application of the theory. The bank-

gives you no chance at all of staking your money against any complex event. It admits only of your staking it in favour of, or against, the simple elements of this compound event. And' . unfortunately, though it always remains highly improbable that any specified run of eight will take place, as you can only stake-- your money time by time on each single one of the eight compo- nent elements of the event, and as, in each of them separately, the- chance is one in two, and not one in 256, it is simply impossible- by the rules of the game so to flay as to have the chances in your favour. I did, indeed, think of requesting the bank to let me stake on the result of two or three successive twirls of the roulette table, instead of on one at a time, but since my French was extremely bad, hardly adequate to protesting against the accidental raking-- up of my money when I had actually won, and since, had it been better, I had no hope that the authorities would comply with a request so very unsafe for themselves,—the drift of which, indeed, the croupiers might hardly have caught at the first. suggestion, but would certainly have suspected,—I reluctantly abandoned my friend's scientific receipt for winning, and was.- contented to lose.

The gamblers of our party were but three in number, and all -

firm of purpose not to exceed the small risk we had prescribed for- ourselves of 125 franca each. I was the eldest and rasheat of the-

three, my money being soonest gone, though not for two or three hours, and it was never for a moment doubtful but that I should. be a loser in the end. My companions were both cooler and' cannier in their play. They did not, like me, precipitately put

down their money before the croupiers had raked up the stakes lost by the previous catastrophe. They did not stretch over other playere.

so awkwardly as I did,—indeed, the croupiers had to rebuke me-

mildly, by begging me to use a rake ; and then, when I did use the rake, I managed to knock the most desperate gambler in the room,

about the head with it, and draw forth a fierce remonstrance,. which made me recall with uncomfortable vividness that there was a pistol-practising ground (" Tir-au-pistolet ") in the garden of the hotel, which would readily furnish the instruments for a meet- ing wherein I should hardly have come off with a mere moral lesson. Indeed, I felt clear, after watching my companions,—one of them a shrewd counsel learned in the law, the other a cool, sagacious Cantab, who came out high in the Tripes the other

day,—that neither of them had the true gambling instinct as strongly as I, though so far as their experience went, it seemed to confirm my own. And what was that experience ? This chiefly,—that I was distinctly conscious of partially attri- touting to some defect or stupidity in my own mind every venture em an issue that proved a failure ; that I groped about within me for something in me like an anticipation or warning (which of course was not to be found) of what the next event was to be, and generally hit upon some vague impulse in my own mind which determined me ; that whenever I succeeded, I raked up my gains with a half-impression that I had been a clever fellow, and had made a judicious stake, just as if I had really moved a skilful move at chess ; and that when I failed, I thought to myself, " Ah, I knew all the time I was going wrong in select- ing that number, and yet I was fool emough to stick to it," which of course was a pure illusion, for all that I did really know was that the chance was even or much more than even, against me. But this illusion followed me throughout. I had a sense of .deserving success when I succeeded, and of having failed through my own wilfulness, or wrong-headed caprice of choice, when I failed. When, as not unfrequently happened, I put a coin on the corner between four numbers, receiving eight times my stake if any of the four numbers turned up, I was conscious of an honest glow of self-applause. I could see the same flickering impressions around me. One man, who was a great winner, evidently thought exceedingly well of his own sagacity of head, and others also, for they were very apt to follow his lead as to stakes, and looked upon him with a sort of temporary and provisional, though purely intellectual respect. But what quite convinced me of the real strength of this curious fallacy of the mind, was that when I heard that the youngest of my companions had actually come off a slight winner, having at the last moment retrieved his previous losses by putting his sole remaining two - franc-piece out of the hundred- and - twenty-five francs he was willing to risk, on the number which represented his age, and gained in consequence thirty-two times his stake, my respect for his shrewdness distinctly rose, and I became sensible of obscure self-reproaches for not having made use of like arbitrary reasons for the selection of the various cumbers on which I had staked my money during the period of any own play. It was true that there was no number high enough, sad to say, for that which would have represented my own age, so that I could not have staked on that,—but then, why not have 'selected numbers whereon to stake that had some real relation to my own life, the day of the month which gave me birth, or the number of the abode in which I work in town ? Evidently in spite of the -clearest understanding of the chances of the game, the moral fallacy which attributes luck or ill-luck to something of capacity or gift, or incapacity and deficiency, in the individual player, must be profoundly ingrained in us. I am convinced that the shadow of merit and demerit is thrown by the mind over multitudes of actions which have no more possibility of either wisdom or folly in them than,—granted, of course, the folly of gambling at all,—the selection of the particular chance on which you win or lose. When you win at one time and lose at another, the mind is almost unable to realise steadily that there was co reason accessible to yourself why you won and why you lost. And so you invent—what you know perfectly well to be a fiction —the conception of some sort of inward divining-rod which guided you right when you used it properly, and failed only because you did not attend adequately to its indications.

Such is the experience which I carried away with me from amidst the objectionable smells, the unsavoury company, the malignant gnats, the haggard revelry, and the general moral squalor of Saxon- tes-Bains ; and when my wife reproached me, with triumphant references to her own warnings, for the missing five pounds, I replied, what I really feel,—though I know I shall never convince her of it,—that my experience was not dearly bought. Is it the only ease in which the fiction that we ourselves have earned,—whether good or evil fortune,—forces itself with absurd tenacity upon us ? Luther himself could hardly have desired a better proof than this of the pranks which the imagination plays us when dealing with that sense of merit and demerit so closely bound up with our human egotism. We give ourselves credit, and get credit, I sus- pect, for a vast deal more both of wisdom and folly in life than we deserve. Are nine-tenths of the prizes and the blanks of life at all more ascribable to any fine selective purpose or deficiency thereof in him who draws them, than my losses, or my friend the Cantab's sudden retrieval of his loss? Yet I still look upon that able and thoughtful Youth with a deep sense of respect for his cleverness in retrieving his losses, and on myself with a melan- choly consciousness that, like " Traddles " in "David Copper. field," my native awkwardness of mind must have been the cause of my very moderate reverses.—I am, Sir, &c., AN INSTRUCTED GAMBLER.