Lottery
a distribution of prizes by chance. The usual method is to place numbered tickets in a wheel and allow some person, usually a child, to draw the lucky numbers. The ticket first drawn entitles the owner to the first prize. Sometimes the prizes or tickets representing them are placed in a second wheel. The first holder's ticket drawn entitles the owner to the prize named on the first prize ticket drawn.
The object of lottery is gain. It is understood that the tickets are sold for a sum total greater than the entire value of the prizes. The inducement to purchase is the possibility of large winnings in return for small investments. The average person is willing to risk a small amount for the chance, however remote, of winning a large amount. The certainty of small loss and the improbability of gain are outweighed by the possibility of drawing a grand prize. After a drawing, the prizes are bruited far and near; the blanks are not heard from. Whether a turkey raffle or a prize drawing, the lottery is a form of gambling.
The lottery is not of recent origin. It is as old as casting lots. Chance has always served to amuse and interest the mind. The Roman emperors introduced lotteries as a form of public amusement. Nero is said to have aroused interest by offering such prizes as a house or a slave. One of his successors introduced such variations as a golden vase and six flies. During the reign of Louis XIV court fetes were enlivened by public drawings.
Governments have not been above filling the public treasury by lottery. The republics of Italy--Venice, Florence, and Genoa--obtained large revenues from public drawings. In France the lottery rose under successive ministers of finance, to be an important source of public income. The expenses of the War of the Spanish Succession were defrayed in this way. Necker, minister of finance, put down the lotteries as good for 4,000,000 livres a year. In 1776 all church, charitable, and private lotteries were suppressed in favor of the lotteries carried on by the government. Five-twenty-fourths of the receipts were retained for profit and expenses; nineteen-twenty-fourths were returned in prizes. There were many small prizes and a few large ones. The purchase of tickets became a craze, and the calculation of chances a mania. The French lottery was suppressed ultimately in 1836. The deposits in the French savings and loan banks showed a sudden increase.
Lotteries were popular in all the countries of Europe. Frankfurt, Vienna, and Amsterdam were centers of excitement. In England public lotteries were authorized as early as 1569 for the repair of harbors, the improvement of cities, and other important objects. From 1793 to 1824 the British government made an average profit of $1,700,000 a year out of lottery schemes.
In America lotteries were correspondingly popular. The Virginia Company was authorized to raise funds by drawings, the object being the settlement of the New World and the improvement of the savage. As early as 1699 a meeting of Boston clergymen denounced lotteries as "a cheat," and their promoters as "pillagers of the people," but, none the less, Faneuil Hall, after its destruction by fire, was rebuilt with funds derived from a public lottery. In 1776 the Continental Congress, at the suggestion of Jefferson, authorized a lottery for the benefit of the public purse. During the first thirty years of the American Congress no less than seventy acts were passed authorizing lotteries for specific purposes.
In 1833 Massachusetts and Pennsylvania passed acts forbidding lotteries. Other states followed in rapid succession. The last stronghold of the lottery was Louisiana. During the period following the Civil War, when the state treasury was exhausted, a company that had been hunted from state to state succeeded in inducing the legislature to charter the Louisiana State Lottery. The state treasury received a fixed share of the receipts. By the arts known to corporations, the company kept its hold on the state. In 1890 Congress came to the aid of the anti-lottery people with an act forbidding the carriage of lottery advertisements or tickets by mail. The company took refuge in Honduras, where it still exists (1905), drawing considerable business from the Gulf States and the Pacific Coast.