|
cy price on good articles, a full price on damaged articles, and throw in an extra sum for no articles at all. Many of them are not at all particular, if the sale of tickets is quick, about throwing in a few hundred more tickets than they had originally provided for, without in the least considering it necessary to add correspondingly to the list of prizes.
But this is not all. How much those who arrange such lotteries really wrong the purchasers of tickets cannot be known. But we can learn how ready the ticket-buyers are to be wronged, when we note what they will allow. It seems absurd enough that they should let the manager of a lottery act entirely without check or control as to the number of tickets or the plan according to which these are drawn. But at least when a day is appointed for the drawing, and the prizes are publicly exhibited in the first instance, and as publicly distributed eventually, the ticket-buyers know that the lottery has. been in some degree bona fide. What, however, can we think of those who will pay for the right of drawing a ticket from a 'wheel of fortune,' without having the least means of determining what is marked on any of the tickets, or whether a single ticket is marked for a prize worth more than the price paid for a chance, or even worth as much ? Yet nothing is more common where such wheels are allowed, and nothing was more common when they were allowed here, than for a shop
man to offer for a definite sum, which frequenters of the shop would readily pay, the chance of drawing a prize-ticket out of a wheel of fortune, though he merely assured them, without a particle of proof, that some of the tickets would give them prizes worth many times the price they paid. Even when there were such tickets, again, and someone had secured a prize (though the chances were that the prize-drawer was connected with the business), people who had seen this would buy chances as though the removal of one good prize-ticket had made no difference whatever in the value of a chance. They would actually be encouraged to buy chances by the very circumstance which should have deterred them. For if a good prize is drawn in such a case, the chances are that no good prize is left.
|
