It was not so very long ago that it requires any effort to remember it. It is only a few years since the lottery held its drawings freely and with much pomp and circumstance in the Charles Theatre, and Generals Beauregard and Early presided at these ceremonies, selling the names they had made glorious in a lost cause to help a cause which was, for the lottery people at least, distinctly a winning one. For in those days the state lottery cleared above all expenses seven million dollars a year, and Generals Beauregard and Early drew incomes from it much larger than the government paid to the judges of the Supreme Court and the members of the cabinet who finally declared against the company and drove it into exile. There had been many efforts made to kill it in the past, and the state lottery was called “the national disgrace” and “the modern slavery,” and Louisiana was spoken of as a blot on the map of our country, as was Utah when polygamy flourished within her boundaries and defied the laws of the federal government. The final rally against the lottery occurred in 1890, when the lease of the company expired, and the directors applied to the legislature for a renewal. At that time it was paying out but very little and taking in fabulous sums; how much it really made will probably never be told, but its gains were probably no more exaggerated by its enemies than was the amount of its expenses by the company itself. Its outlay for advertising, for instance, which must have been one of its chief expenses, was only forty thousand dollars a year, which is a little more than a firm of soap manufacturers pay for their advertising for the same length of time; and it is rather discouraging to remember that for a share of this bribe every newspaper in the city of New Orleans and in the State of Louisiana, with a few notable exceptions, became an organ of the lottery, and said nothing concerning it but what was good. To this sum may be added the salaries of its officers, the money paid out in prizes, the cost of printing and mailing the tickets, and the sum of forty thousand dollars paid annually to the State of Louisiana. This tribute was considered as quite sufficient when the lottery was first started, and while it struggled for ten years to make a living; but in 1890, when its continued existence was threatened, the company found it could very well afford to offer the state not forty thousand, but a million dollars a year, which gives a faint idea of what its net earnings must have been. As a matter of fact, in those palmy times when there were daily drawings, the lottery received on some days as many as eighteen to twenty thousand letters, with orders for tickets enclosed which averaged five dollars a letter.