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The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz

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THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF MODERN GAMING IN ENGLAND

CHAPTER VI. page 21


Just before the revolution of 1848, nearly all the watering-places
in the Prusso-Rhenane provinces, and in Bavaria, and Hesse, Nassau,
and Baden, contained Kursaals, where gambling was openly carried on.
These existed at Aix-la-Chapelle, Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Ems, Kissengen,
and at Spa, close to the Prussian frontier, in Belgium. It is due to
the fierce democrats who revolted against the monarchs of the defunct
Holy Alliance, to say that they utterly swept away the gambling-
tables in Rhenish-Prussia, and in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Herr
Hecker, of the red republican tendencies, and the astounding
wide-awake hat, particularly distinguished himself in the latter
place by his iconoclastic animosity to _Roulette_ and _Rouge et
Noir_. When dynastic "order" was restored the Rhine gaming
tables were re-established. The Prussian Government, much to its
honour, has since shut up the gambling houses at that resort for
decayed nobility and ruined livers, Aix-la-Chapelle. A motion
was made in the Federal Diet, sitting at Frankfort, to constrain
the smaller governments, in the interest of the Germanic good
name generally, to close their _tripots_, and in some
measure the Federal authorities succeeded. The only existing
continental gaming houses authorized by government are now the
two Badens, Spa (of which the lease is nearly expired, and will
not be renewed), Monaco (capital of the ridiculous little Italian
principality, of which the suzerain is a scion of the house of
"Grimaldi"), Malmoe, in Sweden, too remote to do much harm,
and HOMBOURG.

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