)

422 SPECIAL PUBLIC EVILS. [Part VI.

lege of raising $340,000, for the purposes of the Union Canal.By a contract entered into with certain gentlemen of New York,schemes were permitted to be issued to an indefinite extent, uponthe annual payment into the hands of the company of the sum of$30,000. In pursuance of this contract, and under the assumedauthority of the grant, schemes had been issued by the end ofthe year 1833, exceeding, in the aggregate, the astonishing sumof thirty-three millions of dollars. The portentous career of thislottery has been arrested ; but, if it had not been, it is difficult toconjecture how many millions more would have been levied uponthe people, under the pretence that the grant had not been satis-fied. In the State of New York, too, schemes were issued,between the adoption of her new constitution, in 1821, and theend of the year 1833, to the enormous amount of thirty-sevenmillions of dollars. It thus appears, that, to collect a few hundreddollars by means of the lottery system, the assessment must bethousands ; and if the object is to accumulate a few thousands,no less than millions must be extracted from the pockets of thepeople.

But the sacrifice of money, great as the amount has been,is of comparatively small importance, when we inquire into themoral tendency and effects of the system, as made known by ex-perience. As early as 1762, the Provincial Assembly of Penn-sylvania pronounced it to be a mischievous and unlawful game;to be detrimental to youth, and ruinous to the poor ; the sourceof fraud and dishonesty ; alike hurtful to industry, commerce,and trade, as it was baneful to the interests of good citizenship,morality, and virtue.

It is all this and much more. In the train of the lottery sys-tem, an appalling picture of vice, crime, and misery, in everyvaried form, is presented to the mind. Husbands and fathers offamilies, respected through a long and well-sustained course ofyears, have at length, by the influence of this delusive entice-ment, been seduced from their integrity, and brought to end theirdays the tenants of a prison, under the just sentence of deep andcomplicated guilt. Others, again, in the prime of life, holdingimportant public trusts, have become adventurers, by little andlittle, till their own resources have been swept away, and then, for