IX



THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING


Horse-racing--or, at least, betting--is one of the few crafts that are
looked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it.
"It's a mug's game," people say. Even betting men talk like this.
There is a street called Mug's Row in a north of England town: it is
so called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker. Whether
it was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I do
not know. To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuse
of language. Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used to
confess himself a mug in the most penitent fashion. He was a mug,
however, not because he could not make money, but because he could not
keep it. The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared,
used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he was
unable to refuse them. But then he was bitter against the clergy. As a
young man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I could
gather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till the
present day if he had not suddenly been assailed with doubts one
Sabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath.
Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken an
unsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that so
much could be done with such little stones, he did not make quite
clear. Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealed
religion. He quarrelled with his clergyman. He broke the Sabbath. He