1.  Lotteries are liable to many of the strongest objections which can be alleged against gambling.  They have thus far escaped, it is true, the infamy of gambling, but they can plead no exemption from its malignant consequences.  Like gamblers, they are hostile—­not to say fatal—­to all composure of thought and sobriety of conduct.  Like gambling, they inflame the imagination of their victims and their dupes, with visions of ease, and affluence, and pleasure, destined never to be realized.  Like gambling, they seduce men, especially the credulous and the unthinking, from the pursuits of regular industry, into the vortex of wild adventure and exasperated passions.  Like gambling, they ultimately create a necessity for constant vicious excitement.  Like gambling, they often lead to poverty and despair, to insanity and to suicide.  Like gambling, they furnish strong temptations to fraud, and theft, and drunkenness.  Like gambling, they work, in but too many cases, a permanent depravation of all moral principle and all moral habits.  This fearful parallel might easily be extended.  The picture here presented of the evils of lotteries, however fearful it may seem, is not overdrawn.  This picture will be owned as just, by many a bereaved widow and by many a forsaken wife, who trace all their woes to the temptation into which this respectable and legalized species of gambling had betrayed once affectionate husbands.  It will be owned as just by many a child, who has been doomed perchance to a heritage of ignorance and poverty, by a father, for whose weak virtue the potent fascinations of the lottery were found too strong.  In many respects, the lottery system may be deemed even more pernicious than ordinary gambling.  It spreads a more accomplished snare; it is less offensive to decorum; it is less alarming to consciences which have not lost all sensitiveness; it numbers among its participants multitudes of those who ought to blush and to tremble for thus hazarding their own virtue, and for thus corrupting the virtues of others; it draws within its charmed circle men and women who fill up every gradation of age, and character, and fortune.

2.  The lottery system, as at present constituted, presents the strongest temptations to fraud on the part of all those who are concerned either in the drawing of lotteries or in the sale of tickets.  It is not known that fraud has in any case been perpetrated, though fraud is suspected.  If perpetrated, it would be no easy matter to detect it.  The ignorant and the credulous men and women, who seek to better their fortunes by gambling in lottery tickets, know nothing of those mystical combinations of numbers, on which their fate is suspended.  Utter strangers as they are to all the “business transactions” of the lottery system, if cheated at all, they are cheated without remedy.