It was Postmaster-general Wanamaker who put a stop to all this by refusing to allow any printed matter concerning the lottery to pass outside of the State of Louisiana, which decision, when it came, proved to be the order of exile to the greatest gambling concern of modern times. The lottery, of course, fought this decision in the courts, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, and was upheld, and from that time no letter addressed to the lottery in this country, or known to contain matter referring to the lottery, and no newspaper advertising it, can pass through the mails. This ruling was known before the vote on the renewal of the lease came up in the Legislature of Louisiana, and the lottery people say that, knowing that they could not, under these new restrictions, afford to pay the sum of one million dollars a year, they ceased their efforts to pass the bill granting a renewal of their lease, and let it go without a fight. This may or may not be true, but in any event the bill did not pass, and the greatest lottery of all times was without a place in which to spin its wheel, without a charter or a home, and was cut off from the most obvious means of communication with its hundreds of thousands of supporters. But though it was excommunicated, outlawed, and exiled, it was not beaten; it still retained agents all over the country, and it still held its customers, who were only waiting to throw their money into its lap, and still hoping that the next drawing would bring the grand prize. For some long time the lottery was driven about from pillar to post, and knocked eagerly here and there for admittance, seeking a home and resting-place. It was not at first successful. The first rebuff came from Mexico, where it had proposed to move its plant, but the Mexican government was greedy, and wanted too large a sum for itself, or, what is more likely, did not want so well-organized a rival to threaten the earnings of her own national lottery. Then the republics of Colombia and Nicaragua were each tempted with the honor of giving a name to the new company, but each declined that distinction, and so it finally came begging to Honduras, the least advanced of all of the Central-American republics, and the most heavily burdened with debt. [Illustration: THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING]