scaped, it is true, the
infamy of gambling, but they can plead no exemption from its malignant
consequences. Like gamblers, they are hostile--not to say fatal--to all
composure of thought and sobriety of conduct. Like gambling, they
inflame the imagination of their victims and their dupes, with visions
of ease, and affluence, and pleasure, destined never to be realized.
Like gambling, they seduce men, especially the credulous and the
unthinking, from the pursuits of regular industry, into the vortex of
wild adventure and exasperated passions. Like gambling, they ultimately
create a necessity for constant vicious excitement. Like gambling, they
often lead to poverty and despair, to insanity and to suicide. Like
gambling, they furnish strong temptations to fraud, and theft, and
drunkenness. Like gambling, they work, in but too many cases, a
permanent depravation of all moral principle and all moral habits. This
fearful parallel might easily be extended. The picture here presented of
the evils of lotteries, however fearful it may seem, is not overdrawn.
This picture will be owned as just, by many a bereaved widow and by many
a forsaken wife, who trace all their woes to the temptation into which
this _respectable_ and legalized species of gambling had betrayed once
affectionate husbands. It will be owned as just by many a child, who
has been doomed perchance to a heritage of ignorance and poverty, by a
father, for whose weak virtue the potent fascinations of the lottery
were found too strong. In many respects, the lottery system may be
deemed even more pernicious than ordinary gambling. It spreads a more
accomplished snare; it is less offensive to decorum; it is less alarming
to consciences which have not lost all sensitiveness; it numbers among
its participants multitudes of those who ought to blush and to tremble
for thus hazarding their own virtue, and for thus corrupting the virtues
of others; it draws within its charmed circle men and women who fill up
every gradation of age, and character, and fortune.

2. The lottery system, as at present constituted, presents the strongest
temptations to fraud on the part of all those who are concerned either
in the drawing of lotteries or in the sale of tickets. It is not known
that fraud has in any case been perpetrated, though fraud is suspected.
If perpetrated, it would be no easy matter to detect it. The ignorant
and the credulous men and women, who seek to better their fortunes