226 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



protect the public, or rather tried to protect them, 

 from the contractors, not by putting a limit to the 

 price which contractors might obtain for tickets, but 

 by endeavouring to prevent men of small means from 

 buying tickets in shares of less than a certain value. 

 Of course, the laws made for this purpose were readily 

 and systematically broken. The smallest sums were 

 risked, and the only effect of the laws against such 

 purchases was that higher prices had to be paid to 

 cover the risk of detection. We learn that ' all the 

 efforts of the police were ineffectual for the suppression 

 of these illegal proceedings, and for many years a 

 great and growing repugnance was manifested in 

 Parliament to this method of raising any part of the 

 public revenue. At length, in 1823, the last Act that 

 was sanctioned by Parliament for the sale of lottery- 

 tickets contained provisions for putting down all private 

 Lotteries, and for rendering illegal the sale in this 

 kingdom of all tickets or shares of tickets in any 

 foreign lottery which latter provision is to this day 

 extensively evaded.' This was written forty years ago, 

 but might have been written to-day. 



The Scotch and West of England lottery schemes 

 seem to have been carefully based on the experience 

 obtained from those early lotteries. Men were willing 

 in the last century to give more than 201. to the con- 

 tractors for tickets whose real mathematical value 

 amounted only to 101. It seems to have been assumed 

 that in the nineteenth century the experiment might 

 be safely repeated, only the promoters of the schemes 



