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hen a contractor sold a full ticket he usually got from 21/. to 22/. for it; but when he sold a ticket in shares his gain per ticket was considerably greater. The object in limiting the subdivision to one-sixteenth was to prevent laboring men from risking their earnings.
It is hardly necessary to say, however, that the provision was constantly and easily evaded, or that
the means used for evading the limitation only aggravated the evil. At illegal offices, commonly known as 'little goes,' any sum, however small, could be risked, and to cover the chance of detection and punishment these offices required greater profits than the legal lottery offices. Precisely as attempts to prevent usury caused the necessitous borrowers of money to be mulcted even more severely than they would otherwise have been, so the attempt to protect the poor from falling into gambling ways resulted only in driving them to gamble against more ruinous odds.
The record of national lotteries in England ranges over two centuries and a half. It forms an interesting, though little studied, chapter in the history of the nation, and throws curious light on the follies and weaknesses of human nature.
The earliest English lottery on record is that of the year 1569, when 40,000 chances were sold at 10s. each, the prizes being articles of plate, and the profit used in the repair of certain harbors. The gambling spirit seems to have developed greatly during the next century; for, early in the reign of Queen Anne, it was found necessary to suppress private lotteries ' as public nuisances,' a description far better applicable (in more senses than one) to public lotteries. ' In the early period of the history of the National Debt,' says a writer (De Morgan, I believe) in the ' Penny Cyclopaedia,' ' it was usual to pay the prizes in the State lotteries in the form of terminable annuities. In 1694 a loan of a million was raised by the sale of lottery-tickets at 10l. per ticket,
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