nt being in want of money to carry on
the war, resorted to a lottery, and L1,200,000 was set apart or _NAMED_
for the purpose. The tickets were all disposed of in less than six
months, friends and enemies joining in the speculation. It was a great
success; and when right-minded people murmured at the impropriety of
the thing, they were told to hold their tongues, and assured that this
lottery was the very queen of lotteries, and that it had just taken
Namur!(147)

(147) This town was captured in 1695, by William III.

At the same time the Dutch gave in to the infatuation with the utmost
enthusiasm; lotteries were established all over Holland; and learned
professors and ministers of the gospel spoke of nothing else but the
lottery to their pupils and hearers.

From this time forward the spirit of gambling increased so rapidly
and grew so strong in England, that in the reign of Queen Anne private
lotteries had to be suppressed as public nuisances.

The first _parliamentary_ lottery was instituted in 1709, and from this
period till 1824 the passing of a lottery bill was in the programme
of every session. Up to the close of the 18th century the prizes were
generally paid in the form of terminable, and sometimes of perpetual,
annuities. Loans were also raised by granting a bonus of lottery tickets
to all who subscribed a certain amount.

This gambling of annuities, despite the restrictions of an act passed in
1793, soon led to an appalling amount of vice and misery; and in 1808, a
committee of the House of Commons urged the suppression of this ruinous
mode of filling the national exchequer. The last public lottery in Great
Britain was drawn in October, 1826.

The lotteries exerted a most baneful influence on trade, by relaxing the
sinews of industry and fostering the destructive spirit of gaming
among all orders of men. Nor was that all. The stream of this evil was
immensely swelled and polluted, in open defiance of the law, by a set of
artful and designing men, who were ever on the watch to allure and
draw in the ignorant and unwary by the various modes and artifices of
'_insurance_,' which were all most flagrant and gross impositions on the
public, as well as a direct violation of the law. One of the most common
and notorious of these schemes was the insuring of numbers for the next
day's drawing, at a _premium_ which (if legal) was much greater than
adequate to the risk. Thus, in 1778, when the just premium of t