y favourite of fortune,
on whom a prize shall be conferred.

The lotteries, my lords, which former ministers have proposed, have
always been censured by those that saw their nature and their
tendency; they have been considered as legal cheats, by which the
ignorant and the rash are defrauded, and the subtle and avaricious
often enriched; they have been allowed to divert the people from
trade, and to alienate them from useful industry. A man who is uneasy
in his circumstances, and idle in his disposition, collects the
remains of his fortune, and buys tickets in a lottery, retires from
business, indulges himself in laziness, and waits, in some obscure
place, the event of his adventure. Another, instead of employing his
stock in a shop or warehouse, rents a garret in a private street, and
makes it his business, by false intelligence, and chimerical alarms,
to raise and sink the price of tickets alternately, and takes
advantage of the lies which he has himself invented.

Such, my lords, is the traffick that is produced by this scheme of
raising money; nor were these inconveniencies unknown to the present
ministers in the time of their predecessors, whom they never failed to
pursue with the loudest clamours, whenever the exigencies of the
government reduced them to a lottery.

If I, my lords, might presume to recommend to our ministers the most
probable method of raising a large sum for the payment of the troops
of the electorate, I should, instead of the tax and lottery now
proposed, advise them to establish a certain number of licensed
wheelbarrows, on which the laudable trade of thimble and button might
be carried on for the support of the war, and shoeboys might
contribute to the defence of the house of Austria, by raffling for
apples.

Having now, my lords, examined with the utmost candour, all the
reasons which have been offered in defence of the bill, I cannot
conceal the result of my inquiry. The arguments have had so little
effect upon my understanding, that as every man judges of others by
himself, I cannot believe that they have any influence, even upon
those that offer them; and, therefore, I am convinced, that this bill
must be the result of considerations which have been hitherto
concealed, and is intended to promote designs which are never to be
discovered by the authors before their execution.

With regard to these motives and designs, however artfully concealed,
every lord in this assembly is yet at l