Time, instead of softening or subduing the misery, had extended its ramifications into the highest, as it once had been confined to the lowest, society. The middle class—ordinarily supposed to be freest from vice—had gradually succumbed. The penniless miscreant of one day became the opulent gambler of the next; and the drawing of the lotteries might be marked by the aspect of the pawnbrokers’ shops, which overflowed with the goods of the laborer, with the ornaments of the middle class, and with the jewels of the rich. Servants went to distant places with the purloined property of their masters, pledged it, and, destroying the tickets, insured in the lottery. Manufacturers discharged those workmen who could not resist the temptation. During the drawing of the prizes less labor was done by the artisans. Housekeepers of the lower order were unable to pay their taxes; money was begged from benevolent societies; and men, pretending they were penniless, were fed and housed by the parish while embarking in these chimerical schemes. Felons, on the morning of an ignominious death, named lotteries as the first cause; and often, if a dream pointed to a particular number, crimes were committed to procure it, which led to transportation instead of fortune. Individuals presented themselves to insure, with such unequivocal marks of poverty in their appearance, that even the office-keepers refused their money; and yet, such was the indefatigable love of adventure, that many would come in at one door as fast as they were shown out at the other. “When I have caught a great many in a room together,” said one witness, “I have found most of them poor women, and in their pockets twenty or thirty, and even sixty, duplicates on one person. Their pillows, their bolsters, their very clothes, were pledged, till they were almost naked.” “First,” said Mr. Sheridan, “they pawned ornaments and superfluities, then their beds, the very clasps of their children’s shoes, the very clothes of the cradle. The pawnbroker grew ashamed of his profession.” A walk near the spot where the prizes were announced painfully evinced the progress this terrible delusion had made, and the classes to which it had extended.