Sport: Layers & Players

As a form of gambling, betting on a horse race is less expensive than the stockmarket, healthier than playing cards, less brutal than bearbaiting, more spectacular than roulette. Largely because of these advantages, horse racing has long seemed a particularly pernicious sport to those who consider all gambling immoral. At the turn of the Century there started a wave of earnest reform to curtail gambling by putting a stop to racetrack betting. Typical was the history of the reform in New York, where there has generally been more horse racing than anywhere else...

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