and the excess constituted the Government profit. It was customary, for many years, for the contractors to give about £16 to the Government, and then to charge the public from £20 to £22. It was made lawful for the contractors to divide the shares into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths; and the contractors always charged relatively more for these aliquot parts. A man with thirty shillings to spare could buy a sixteenth; and the contractors made a large portion of their profit out of such customers. The Government sometimes paid the prizes in terminable annuities instead of cash; and the loan system and the lottery system were occasionally combined in a very odd way. Thus in 1780, every subscriber of £1000 towards a loan of £12,000,000, at four per cent., received a bonus of four lottery tickets, the value of each of which was £10, and any one of which might be the fortunate number for a twenty or thirty thousand pounds prize. Among the lottery offices, the competition for business was intense. One firm, finding an old woman in the country named Goodluck, gave her £50 a year on condition that she would join them as a nominal partner, for the sake of the attractive effect of her name. In their advertisements each was sedulous to tell how many of the grand prizes had in former years fallen to the lot of persons who had bought at his shop. Woodcuts and copies of verses were abundant, suited to attract the uneducated.”
The first lottery in this country, so far as is known, took place in 1569. Dr Rawlinson, a distinguished antiquary of the last century, produced before the Antiquarian Society in 1748 the