LOTTERY, a game of hazard, in which prizes are drawn by lot. Usually, a lottery eomprises a specified quantity of tickets, each numbered, every ticket-holder having a right to draw from £1 box a prize or blank, as the case may happen to be, and thus gain or lose. Lotteries are, of course, got up for the sake of the profit which they may yield to their proprietors; for the aggregate sum expended in prizes always falls short of the aggregate purchase-money for tickets. Whatever be the actual form of the lottery, it is indisputably a gambling transaction, the risks and losses of which are now acknowledged to be demoralizing. Lotteries are said to have been first employed by the Genoese gov ernment as a means of adding to the revenue of the country, and the bad example was soon followed by the governments of other nations. The first lottery in England appears to have been in the year 1569, and the profits went to the repair of harbors and other public works. The same means was frequently afterwards resorted to for addi tions to the revenue, or for particular objects, under control or by sanction of the gov ernment, the mode of conducting the lottery, and the conditions, being from time to thne varied. In the early years of the present century, the state lottery, as it was usually called, was one of the regular institutions of the country. Usually, the number of tickets in a lottcry was 20,000, at a value of 10 each in prizes. r At this valuation they were offered to the competition of contractors, mid oMinarily assigned at an advance of 25 or £6 per ticket. The contracting party sold them to the public at a further advance of £4 to £5 per ticket; and thus the value was about doubled. The contractor devised the scheme of prizes and blanks—there being always a few prizes of large amount to tempt purchasers. To accommodate persons with moderate means, certain tickets were divided into halves, and others into quarters, eighths, or sixteenths. A common price for a sixteenth was £1 11s, 6d. In the event of the number which it bore being drawn, a prize of £20,000, a sixteenth part of that sum was paid, and so on with other prizes.
The dexterity of the contractors consisted in drawing up " schemes," which in all -varieties of placards and hand-bills were issued in profusion through the means of agents all over the country. The drawing took place on a specified day or days in a public hall in London, before certain commissioners, and was in this wise. Two machines, called " wheels," were appropriated, one for the numbers, and the other for the prizes and blanks. On a number being drawn, its fate was determined by the billet which next afterwards came out. Two boys were the operators, one at each wheel. On the grounds of injury to public morals, lotteries were altogether abolished by act of parliament in 1826. Persons advertising or circulating tickets for foreign lotteries may be sued for a penalty by the attorney-general, or lord-advocate, or the commissioners of stamps. It required a special statute, therefore, to legalize art-unions, which are only lotteries under a specious form; but owing to their supposed good effects in encouraging .art, they were exempted from penalties by the statute 9 and 10 Viet. c. 48, and a sim ilar voluntary association was excepted by the statute 21 and 22 Viet. c. 102. In France, the abolition of lotteries took place in 1836, and in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1852. The other German states, however, continued the use of them; and in 1841, Prussia derived front them a revenue of more than 900,000 thalers. Austria, of 3,600,000 florins. In the kingdom of Italy lotteries still exist. Few worse ways of supplying the exchequer of a country have almost ever been imagined; and the only excuse urged is, that the gam bling spirit exists, and will find some means of gratification, even if lotteries were abol ished. It was found, however, in France that the abolition of lotteries was immediately followed by an increase of savings-bank deposits; and it has been everywhere observed that the purchasers of lottery-tickets have been to a great extent persons belonging, not to the wealthiest classes of society, but to those in which economy and prudence are most necessary to the comfort of families and the general welfare of the state.