They will employ their talents according to their habits
and their interests. They will not follow the plough whilst they can
direct treasuries and govern provinces.
Your legislators, in everything new, are the very first who have
founded a commonwealth upon gaming, and infused this spirit into it as
its vital breath. The great object in these politics is to
metamorphose France from a great kingdom into one great playtable;
to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters; to make
speculation as extensive as life; to mix it with all its concerns
and to divert the whole of the hopes and fears of the people from
their usual channels into the impulses, passions, and superstitions of
those who live on chances. They loudly proclaim their opinion that
this their present system of a republic cannot possibly exist
without this kind of gaming fund, and that the very thread of its life
is spun out of the staple of these speculations. The old gaming in
funds was mischievous enough, undoubtedly, but it was so only to
individuals. Even when it had its greatest extent, in the
Mississippi and South Sea, it affected but few, comparatively; where
it extends further, as in lotteries, the spirit has but a single
object. But where the law, which in most circumstances forbids, and in
none countenances, gaming, is itself debauched so as to reverse its
nature and policy and expressly to force the subject to this
destructive table by bringing the spirit and symbols of gaming into
the minutest matters and engaging everybody in it, and in
everything, a more dreadful epidemic distemper of that kind is
spread than yet has appeared in the world.
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