voyage, beating his breast and tearing his hair in the violence of rage,
for having lost three hatchets at one of these races, and which he had
purchased with nearly half of his property."

But it is not necessary to go beyond our own country for a confirmation
of these evils. Civilized as we are beyond all the people who have been
mentioned, and living where the Christian religion is professed, we have
the misfortune to see our own countrymen engaged in similar pursuits,
and equally to the disturbance of the tranquillity of their minds, and
equally to their own ruin. They cannot, it is true, stake their personal
liberty, because they can neither sell themselves, nor be held as
slaves. But we see them staking their comfort, and all their prospects
in life. We see them driven into a multitude of crimes. We see them
suffering in a variety of ways. How often has duelling, with all its
horrible effects, been the legitimate offspring of gaming! How many
suicides have proceeded from the same source! How many persons in
consequence of a violation of the laws, occasioned solely by gaming,
have come to ignominious and untimely ends!

Thus it appears that gaming, wherever it has been practised to excess,
whether by cards, or by dice, or by other instruments, or whether among
nations civilized or barbarous, or whether in ancient or modern times,
has been accompanied with the most violent excitement of the passions,
so as to have driven its votaries to desperation, and to have ruined
their morality and their happiness.

It is upon the excitement of the passions, which must have risen to a
furious height, before such desperate actions as those, which have been
specified, could have commenced, that the Quakers have founded their
second argument for the prohibition of games of chance, or of any