eries "for promoting public worship and the advancement
of religion." Canals, turnpikes, bridges, excavations, public buildings
were brought to perfection by lotteries. Schools and academies were thus
endowed; for instance, the Leicester Academy and the Williamstown Free
School. In short, "the interests of literature were supported, the arts
encouraged, the wastes of wars repaired, inundations prevented, the
burthen of the taxes lessened" by lotteries. Private lotteries were also
carried on in great number, as frequent advertisements show; pieces of
furniture, wearing apparel, real estate, jewelry, and books being given
as prizes. Much deception was practised in those private lotteries.

Though many lotteries were ostensibly for charitable, educational, or
other beneficial purposes, the proportion of profit applied to such
purposes was small. The Newbury Bridge Lottery sold ten thousand
dollars' worth of tickets to raise one thousand dollars. The lottery to
assist in rebuilding Faneuil Hall was to secure one-tenth of the value
of tickets. Harvard College hoped to have twelve and a half per cent.
The glowing advertisements of "Rich Wheels," "Real & Truly Fortunate
Offices," "Lucky Numbers," "Full Drawings," appealed to every class; the
poorest could buy a quarter of a ticket as a speculation. New England
clergymen seemed specially to delight in this gambling excitement.

The evil of the system could not fail to be discovered by intelligent
citizens. Judge Sewall, ever thoughtful, wrote his protest to friends
when he found advertisements of four lotteries in one issue of the
_Boston News Letter_. Though I have seen lottery tickets signed by John
Hancock, he publicly expressed his aversion to the system, and Joel
Barker and others wrote in condemnation. By 1830 the whole community
seemed to have wakened to a sense of their pernicious and unprofitable
effect, and laws were passed prohibiting them.

The sports and diversions herein named, of the first century of the
Puritan commonwealth, were, after all, joined in by but a scanty
handful of junketers. We see in our picture of the olden times no
revellers, but a "crowd of sad-visaged people moving duskily through a
dull gray atmosphere," who found, as Carlyle said, that work was
enjoyment enough. The Pilgrim Fathers had been saddened with war and
pestilence, with superstition, with exile, still they had as a contrast
the keen novelty of life in the picturesque new land. The