The weak spot in this plan, we imagine, would be the difficulty in keeping the _blanks_ entirely secret. * * * * * We have not undertaken to give an account of all the lotteries of which we have seen advertisements, as our limits would not admit of it, even if it could be made interesting to those who like to read about such matters; New England alone would fill a large volume. We will name only a few of the more prominent lotteries,--the Land Bank, in 1759; the Pavement on Boston Neck, the same year. Then there was the Charlestown lottery, the Hatfield Bridge, Sudbury, the Amoskeag Canal, the South Hadley Canal, the Philanthropic, the Kennebec, the Dartmouth College, the Gloucester Road, the Plymouth Beach, etc. All these, of course, were public lotteries, and were managed by the first men in the community. In relation to private lotteries it would now be difficult to ascertain the facts. There must have been a great number of these; probably they were not always honestly conducted. We have heard that there were shops where the inexperienced were supplied with bogus tickets,--blanks of some drawn lottery. Bad men, unfortunately, are to be found in all kinds of business; but we know that in Salem all the men whose names we have mentioned were among the very best in the community. Although laws are now in force in Massachusetts and some other States against lotteries, there appears to be no essential difference, as far as the morality of the thing is concerned, between the old lottery and the modern raffle,--and indeed a certain species of stock gambling, it seems to us, is worse than either in its moral effects. After the year 1826, or thereabout, lotteries appear to have become unpopular, and laws were passed prohibiting them. Their unprofitableness, moreover, seems then to have been more clearly seen. As we have already said, there had always been some who saw the evils which must result from such schemes. Notably among prominent men who in Massachusetts used their influence against them were John Hancock,[1] of Revolutionary fame, and afterwards governor of the Commonwealth, and Peter C. Brooks, a distinguished merchant of Boston, father-in-law of Edward Everett. The "Salem Gazette" of Sept. 16, 1794, says: "Considering the acknowledged immoral tendency of _Lotteries,_ it is astonishing how much is said in the Boston papers in favor of that which our Legislature has lately instituted for Harvard College. Our late worthy Governor Hancock, in a public address to the General Court, gave his testimony against this species of gambling, so calculated to ensnare and injure those classes of worthy citizens who are guiltless of that vice in its common form." [Footnote 1: Although we have seen lottery tickets signed by Hancock earlier in life.]