e. We will name only
a few of the more prominent lotteries,--the Land Bank, in 1759; the
Pavement on Boston Neck, the same year. Then there was the Charlestown
lottery, the Hatfield Bridge, Sudbury, the Amoskeag Canal, the South
Hadley Canal, the Philanthropic, the Kennebec, the Dartmouth College,
the Gloucester Road, the Plymouth Beach, etc. All these, of course,
were public lotteries, and were managed by the first men in the
community. In relation to private lotteries it would now be difficult to
ascertain the facts. There must have been a great number of these;
probably they were not always honestly conducted. We have heard that
there were shops where the inexperienced were supplied with bogus
tickets,--blanks of some drawn lottery. Bad men, unfortunately, are to
be found in all kinds of business; but we know that in Salem all the men
whose names we have mentioned were among the very best in the community.

Although laws are now in force in Massachusetts and some other States
against lotteries, there appears to be no essential difference, as far
as the morality of the thing is concerned, between the old lottery and
the modern raffle,--and indeed a certain species of stock gambling, it
seems to us, is worse than either in its moral effects. After the year
1826, or thereabout, lotteries appear to have become unpopular, and laws
were passed prohibiting them. Their unprofitableness, moreover, seems
then to have been more clearly seen. As we have already said, there had
always been some who saw the evils which must result from such schemes.
Notably among prominent men who in Massachusetts used their influence
against them were John Hancock,[1] of Revolutionary fame, and afterwards
governor of the Commonwealth, and Peter C. Brooks, a distinguished
merchant of Boston, father-in-law of Edward Everett. The "Salem Gazette"
of Sept. 16, 1794, says: "Considering the acknowledged immoral tendency
of _Lotteries,_ it is astonishing how much is said in the Boston papers
in favor of that which our Legislature has lately instituted for Harvard
College. Our late worthy Governor Hancock, in a public address to the
General Court, gave his testimony against this species of gambling, so
calculated to ensnare and injure those classes of worthy citizens who
are guiltless of that vice in its common form."

[Footnote 1: Although we have seen lottery tickets signed by Hancock
earlier in life.]

In some foreign countries and in a few of the St