Chap. IV.]

THE LOTTERY SYSTEM.

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to discuss the merits of a scheme, or to lounge in a lottery office.Though often the loser, he is sometimes the gainer; new excite-ment is thereby given to his passion ; he is urged on to new ad-ventures ; great good fortune only whets his appetite for greaterstill; and continued ill-luck only nourishes the hope of its speedytermination. Driven, as well by the desperate necessity ofministering to his excitement, as by depraved principles andreckless despair, he is ready for the perpetration of any enor-mity. The effects of the lottery system, therefore, on the char-acter, are at least as ruinous as the effects of ordinary gaming.What claim, then, has such a system to be cherished and nur-tured by the genial sunshine of protective legislation, in a coun-try, with whose entire policy it is directly at war, whose interestconsists in presenting every incentive to useful and honorableexertion, and in making wealth the fruit of intelligent and perse-vering industry ?

6. The tendency of this system to raise up and encourageidlers, spendthrifts, and gamesters of every description, ought tobe more distinctly brought to view than it has hitherto been.The Philadelphia committee of 1831, before referred to, affirm,that the number of these classes of persons has been daily aug-menting in that city ; a fact, which, they say, no citizen, notwhollyinattentive to what is passing around him, can have failed to noticeand deplore. In Philadelphia, the number of lottery offices in1831 was ascertained to be one hundred and seventy-seven, and in1833, the number was estimated to be more than two hundred. Itwas estimated, too, that between five and six hundred persons wereemployed to attend to the business of these two hundred or moreoffices. These persons subsist and grow rich by preying upontheir deluded fellow-citizens. Boys of the tenderest age areinitiated into all the mysteries of the craft, which are those ofhabitual falsehood and schemes of rapine. The artifices prac-tised to deceive the credulous, allure the unwary, and induce apurchase, and the frauds devised for robbing the wretched victimof his prize, when he happens to draw one, are matter of commonnotoriety. Then, too, observe the scenes and spectacles at thedrawings, which, it is affirmed, occur, in some of our cities, almostevery fortnight throughout the year. Hundreds of wretched