760 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
least, the mechanical and routine elements are absent, and there is no demand for a steady physical activity of the non-competi- tive type. Policemen, firemen, detectives, livery-stable men, coachmen, barkeepers, and barbers are more or less valuable to society, and many of them are very hard workers, but their occu- pations differ from hard labor in affording considerable oppor- tunity for sitting about and an occasional chance to see or join a fight or a game, to talk, or play the races.
And, finally, we have the extreme cases of the tramp and criminal, representing a failure to accept the social arrange- ments at all. There is either a congenital variational inability of the organism to adjust itself to the artificial habits of the race, or a failure in society to provide the proper suggestions in early life to the members of these classes ; or, otherwise stated, the defect may lie in the organism or in the educational system.
We are now, perhaps, in a position to understand how gam- bling comes to exist and why it is so fascinating. It is a means of keeping up the conflict interest and of securing all the pleasure-pain sensations of conflict activity with little effort and no drudgery ; and, incidentally or habitually, it may be a means of securing money that is, potential satisfactions of all possible kinds, through the gains accruing to the winner. In gambling the risk is imminent, the attention strained, the emotions strong; and even where the element of skill is removed entirely and the decision left to chance, an emotional reaction analogous to the feeling in the genuine conflict is felt. From this standpoint our problem is not so much to account for the gambler as to account for the business-man. The gaming instinct is born in all normal persons. It is one expression of a powerful reflex fixed far back in animal experience. The instinct is, in itself, right and indis- pensable, but we discriminate between its applications. It is valued in war and business ; it expresses itself in a thousand forms in the games of children and in college athletics ; it is approved in such expressions as golf, tennis, and billiards, as a recreation for the man of affairs ; but society justly condemns the exercise of the instinct aside from activities which create val- ues. The value may be in the increased health and vigor which
