ne, or
Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a
ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally,
unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their
investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and
that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal
to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown
relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the
Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings--really more
dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one,
"Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don't choose drink
only as much as you want in me, and if you don't choose to enter me at
all, avoid me forever and a day"--then the iniquity of the whole
organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present
all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem
to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The
"prohibition extremists" are like lawyers who can never make their
case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These
extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a
kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and
the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will
continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an
incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding
certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us
say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an
educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are
kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress
will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal,
and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the
odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired
of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it
sprang.

He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and
pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search
the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at
once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To
realize in its full glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this
environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after
he