The Government itself was in a measure responsible for the diffusion of the passion for gambling. The pernicious custom of public lotteries practically legalized this baneful vice. State lotteries began in the reign of Elizabeth, and existed down to 1826. They brought in a considerable revenue, but they did infinite mischief by developing the rage for speculation, which extended to the whole community. The rich could purchase whole tickets, or “great goes”; for the more impecunious the tickets were subdivided into “little goes.” Those who had no tickets at all could still gamble at the lottery insurance offices by backing any particular number to win. The demoralizition was widespread. It reached a climax in the South Sea bubble, when thousands and thousands were first decoyed, then cruelly deceived and beggared. But lotteries lingered on till the Government at length awoke to the degradation of obtaining an income from such a source. While crime thus stalked rampant through the land, the law was nearly powerless to grapple and check it. It had practically but one method of repression--the wholesale removal of convicted offenders to another world. Of prevention as we understand it our forefathers had but little idea. The metropolis, with its ill-paved, dimly-lighted streets, was without police protection beyond that afforded by a few feeble watchmen, the sorely-tried and often nearly useless “Charlies.” The administration of justice was defective; the justices had not sufficient powers; they were frequently “as regardless of the law as ignorant of it,”[149] or else were defied by pettifoggers and people with money in their pockets. “A mob of chairmen or servants, or a gang of thieves, are almost too big for the civil authority to repress;”[150] and the civil power generally, according to Fielding, was in a lethargic state. Yet private enterprise had sought for some time past to second the efforts of the State, and various societies for the reformation of manners laboured hard, but scarcely with marked success, to reduce crime. The first of these societies originated in the previous century by six private gentlemen, whose hearts were moved by the dismal and desperate state of the country “to engage in the difficult and dangerous enterprise;” and it was soon strengthened by the addition of “persons of eminency in the law, members of Parliament, justices of the peace, and considerable citizens of London of known abilities and great integrity.” There was a second society of about fifty persons, tradesmen, and others; and a third society of constables, who met to consider how they might best discharge their oaths; a fourth to give information; while other bodies of householders and officers assisted in the great work. These in one year, that of 1724, had prosecuted 2723 persons, and in the thirty-three years preceding 89,393; while in the same period they had given away 400,000 good books.