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Updated: June 26, 2025
Should taxes be laid on flour, meat and eggs, on woolen cloth, on silks, velvets, ostrich plumes and diamonds? Should taxes be laid on whiskey, wines, tobacco, cigars and race-tracks? Should taxes be devised, or continued, to protect such infant industries as now handle our kerosene oil, meat, sugar and steel?
If any theatre gave a show at which men and horses were habitually crippled or killed in full sight of the audience, the manager would be put on his trial for manslaughter. Our race-tracks use up their yearly average of horses and men without attracting remark. One would suppose that the risk being so great the profits were enormous; but they are not.
It was not a function of "society," but all "society" was there and most keenly interested; for in a warlike country, just as in the Middle Ages, the master's life may depend upon the qualities of his horse. I have always been fond of horses and horse-racing, and the race-tracks about Berlin were always an attraction for me. Many of the drivers and jockeys were Americans.
Jim, we must be three millions losers, and the men who have our money have so many, many millions that they can't live long enough even to thumb them over. Men who will use our money on the gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander it on stage harlots, or in turning their wives and daughters or their neighbours' wives and daughters into worse than stage harlots.
In some unexplained manner, the Honourable George, who is never as reserved in public as I could wish him to be, had chummed up with this person at one of the race-tracks, and had thereafter been almost quite too pally with him and with the very curious other members of his family the name being Floud.
"My boy," said the Colonel, "the odds are far too heavy a million against the mare. You can't stand 'em." "Oh, Frank," said his Aunt, impulsively, "if you'll only take the money and give up racing!" He laughed. Miss Alathea's strong prejudice against the race-tracks was proverbial. "So that's what you're after!" he exclaimed. "You dear old schemer!"
Or had any more produced over his name?" asked Larcher. "No. He put the greater part of his profits into theatrical management. He multiplied his investment. Then he 'branched out; tried Wall Street and the race-tracks; went into real estate. He speculates now in many things. I don't know how rich he is.
We loiter in Paris, do the stupid German watering-places, the Norway fjords, down to Italy for the museums, see the chateaux of the Loire, or do the English race-tracks, thinking we're 'mused; and all the time out here where the sun goes down is an intensely interesting and beautiful country of our own that we overlook. You know I'd never before been even as far as Chicago.
Others, less fortunate, had disappeared altogether from their accustomed haunts and were to be found filling minor positions in some far Western frontier town or camp, or menial berths on a railroad, while at least one victim, too cowardly to leave the field, had haunted the lunch counters, hotel lobbies, and race-tracks for months, preying on friends and acquaintances alike until dire poverty forced him into crime, and a stone cell and a steel grille had ended the struggle.
Few of them had changed, but for the worse. Most of them were penniless, hungry and threadbare, but still the victims of the hopeless vice, and whenever fortune threw in their way a dollar, it went into the insatiable maw of the race-tracks.
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