To confess the truth, I should feel very little pain from an account
that the nation was for some time determined to be less liberal of
their contribution, and that money was withheld till it was known in
what expeditions it was to be employed, to what princes subsidies were
to be paid, and what advantages were to be purchased by it for our
country. I should rejoice my lords, to hear that the lottery by which
the deficiencies of this duty are to be supplied, was not filled; and
that the people were grown at last wise enough to discern the fraud,
and to prefer honest commerce, by which all may be gainers, to a game
by which the greatest number must certainly lose, and in which no man
can reasonably expect that he shall be the happy favourite of fortune,
on whom a prize shall be conferred.
The lotteries, my lords, which former ministers have proposed, have
always been censured by those that saw their nature and their
tendency; they have been considered as legal cheats, by which the
ignorant and the rash are defrauded, and the subtle and avaricious
often enriched; they have been allowed to divert the people from
trade, and to alienate them from useful industry.
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