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le ends can at all justify immoral means, one might go further still, and allow money to be obtained for such purposes by the encouragement of still more objectionable vices. We might in fact recognize quite a new meaning in the saying that 'Charity covers a multitude of sins.'
I have said that a lottery in which all the prizes were goods such as might be sold, retail, at prices amounting to the total cost of all the tickets sold, would be strictly fair. I do not know whether a lottery ever has been undertaken in that way. But certainly it seems conceivable that such a thing might have happened; and in that case, despite the objections which, as we have shown, exist against such an arrangement, there would have been a perfectly fair lottery. Adam Smith, in his ' Wealth of Nations,' seems to have omitted the consideration of lotteries of this kind, when he said that ' the world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery, or one in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss; because the under- taker could gain nothing by it.' Indeed, it has certainly happened in several cases that there have been lotteries in which the total price of the tickets fell short of the total value of the prizes--these being presents made for a charitable purpose, and the tickets purposely sold at very low prices. It is well known, too, that in ancient Rome, where lotteries are said to have been invented, chances in lotteries were often, if not always, distributed gratuitously.
But assuredly Adam Smith is justified in his remark if it be regarded as relating solely to lotteries in which the prizes have been sums of money, and gain has been the sole object of the promoters. ' In the State lotteries,' as he justly says, ' the tickets are really not worth the price which is paid by the original subscribers,'
very imperfect information respecting some of the more monstrous cases of robbery (no other word meets the case) by promoters of some of these State swindles.
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