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The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz

 CHAPTER XIII. page 9

This gambling of annuities, despite the restrictions of an act
passed in 1793, soon led to an appalling amount of vice and
misery; and in 1808, a committee of the House of Commons urged
the suppression of this ruinous mode of filling the national
exchequer. The last public lottery in Great Britain was drawn in
October, 1826.

The lotteries exerted a most baneful influence on trade, by
relaxing the sinews of industry and fostering the destructive
spirit of gaming among all orders of men. Nor was that all. The
stream of this evil was immensely swelled and polluted, in open
defiance of the law, by a set of artful and designing men, who
were ever on the watch to allure and draw in the ignorant and
unwary by the various modes and artifices of `_insurance_,' which
were all most flagrant and gross impositions on the public, as
well as a direct violation of the law. One of the most
common and notorious of these schemes was the insuring of numbers
for the next day's drawing, at a _premium_ which (if legal) was
much greater than adequate to the risk. Thus, in 1778, when the
just premium of the lottery was only 7_s_. 6_d_., the office-
keepers charged 9_s_., which was a certain gain of nearly 30 per
cent.; and they aggravated the fraud as the drawing advanced.

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