madness was often created, suicide itself was produced, and crimes subjecting the perpetrators of them to death were committed.” Sir Nathaniel Conant, who in 1816 was chief magistrate of Bow Street, stated to a committee of the House of Commons that the Lottery was one of the predisposing causes by which the people of the metropolis were vitiated; that it led to theft, to supply losses and disappointments occasioned by speculating on its chances; and that illegal insurances continued to be effected. “There are,” he says, “people in the background, who, having got forty or fifty thousand pounds by that, employ people of the lowest order, and give them a commission for what they bring; there is, a wheel within a wheel.” Another magistrate giving evidence before the same committee, said, “It is a scandal to the Government, thus to excite people to practise the vice of gaming for the purpose of drawing a revenue from their ruin. It is an anomalous proceeding by law to declare gambling infamous; to hunt out petty gamblers in their recesses, and cast them into prison; and by law also to set up the giant gambling of the State Lottery, and encourage persons to resort to it by the most captivating devices which ingenuity uncontrolled by moral rectitude can invent.” This evidence may be regarded as the ultimate cause of the suppression of lotteries, which might have dragged on an existence for a few more years had it not been for the atrocities of the insurance-mongers. We will now turn towards the closing scenes in this eventful drama.
Seldom was human ingenuity more exercised than in giving public notoriety to lottery schemes. The originators or proprietors of