Let us look into the late lotteries; had not a piercing eye detected the roguery, and not the fall of other things taken off the edge of the people’s fancy for venturing. These artists have brought up the tickets to sixteen shillings apiece, advance, even before the act was passed. That this could not be but by securing the possession of all the tickets in their own hands, except such select tickets as were not to come to market, I say this could not be but by connivance, and this every one knows; and that this connivance again could not be but by some higher people than those that were named to it, this, also, every one may know. Who they were, is none of my business to inquire, though it is easy to guess. It is very hard when our statesmen come into a confederacy to bite the people, and when dukes turn stock-jobbers. Yet that this was done is most certain; and what was this but making a property of the power that might be in their hands, the better to bite the people? For if the Parliament appointed £500,000 in tickets, to be given out at a certain rate that was low and reasonable, was it not to encourage the people, on whom the rest of the national burden lies? And if, by the craft and knavery of jobbers, the people are made to pay £600,000 for them, which is much about the case, pray, why not pay the hundred thousand pounds to the public, either to pay off a hundred thousand pounds of debt, or to make the burden of the current year a hundred thousand pounds lighter?—of which, I am sure, there is need enough. It has been, indeed, our happiness, that a worthy member, being informed of this abominable cheat, detected it, and laid it before the House; upon which a vote was passed to make void all bargains make for tickets before the act was passed; so the biters were bitten; and a certain Sir George —— was obliged to refund; but the roguery of the design was never a jot the less for that. But the fatal influence of this growing evil does not end here, and I must trace stock-jobbing now to its new-acquired capacity of intermeddling with the public, assisting rebellion, encouraging invasion; and if I do not bring the stock-jobbers, even the Whigs among them, to be guilty of treason against their king and country, and that of the worst kind, too, then I do nothing. Had the stock-jobbers been all Jacobites by profession, or had the employment led them by the necessity of their business to put king and nation, and particularly their own, to bargain and sale; and had the feeling of news been their property, and they had an act of Parliament, or patent, to entitle them to the sole privilege of imposing what false things they pleased on the people, I should have had much the less reason to have complained of their roguery, and have rather turned myself to the rest of them people, who are the subject they work upon, and only have stood at Exchange Alley end, and cried out, “Gentlemen, have a care of your pockets.”