sometimes forty per cent. advance. The vain hope of gaining some of the greatest prizes is the sole cause of this demand. The soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds; though they know that even that small sum is perhaps twenty or thirty per cent. more than the chance is worth. In a lottery in which no prize exceeds twenty pounds, though in other respects it approach much nearer to a perfectly fair one than the common State lotteries, there would not be the same demand for tickets. In order to have a better chance for some of the great prizes, some people purchase several tickets, and others small shares in a still greater number. There is not, however, a more certain proposition in mathematics, than that the more tickets you adventure upon the more likely you are to be a loser. Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer you approach to this certainty.” Though this was written in reference to a state of affairs long past, the lesson is not without
October 18, 1826, saw the last of the State lotteries, but it was long before the smaller fry were eradicated. Conducted very quietly at first, but after a while their promoters growing bolder, lotteries for clothes, furniture, and, especially at Christmas-time, for food and drink, were openly advertised under the title of “sweeps” up to comparatively recent times. A few police prosecutions about a dozen years back improved these relics of a past day off the face of the