The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-11-09 00:00:00

THE DEPRESSION IN TRADE.

On the subject of the existing depression in trade The
Times has published the following letters :

Sir,—ln this period of depressed trade your space is
more frequently demanded for the complaint of the
producer than it is required to express the content of
the consumer. Cheap food, cheap fuel, and cheap
clothing are, however, no small consolation to most
folks. The man who by good fortune has a fixed
income, or by good management has a fixed expendi-
ture, finds bad times in free-trade England by no
means as bad as they might be—better far than, I
fear, they are found by the Americans.
We must sympathise of course with those to whom
large profits and high wages seem long returning, but
meantime to us, the public, there is a compensation.
CONSUMER.

Sir, —The letter of " Consumer " does not go to the
root of the matter. We are a nation chiefly importing
natural products—corn, cotton, tobacco—and export-
ing manufactures. In America our manufactures are
shut out by a 40 per cent. duty at the port. Thus they
protect their manufacturers. Why should not ours be
reciprocally protected? They will not withheld their
corn and cotton, on which we need put no duty,
because we put a reciprocal duty on manufactured
goods. It may be said we buy some imported goods
cheaper than we can supply them here. But, admit-
ting that this may be so to a small extent, does the
advantage at all approach the loss which foreign duties
inflict on all the great industries of this country?
Twenty years ago we were the workshop of the
world, and could trade in spite of duties. But the
exorbitant demands of men and masters made all our
manufactures so hard to buy that the mines and
natural resources of foreign countries have been rapidly
developed, mills erected, our emigrants employed at
low wages, our best processes exposed at our great
exhibitions; and now we are out of the running. It
is in vain that we lower now our wages and prices.
But surely we should employ all incentives to get fair
play. Instead, while in this condition our goods are
still loaded with duties abroad, we admit those of the
foreigners without duty, and some call it free trade.
Are we the only people who understand political
economy? Others look after their own interest; why
should not AN ENGLISH PRODUCER?

THE FRENCH NATIONAL LOTTERY.

On the subject of the Lottery in connection with the Paris
Exhibition The Timsa of Wectnesday has the following
leader:—

" France has found a new excitement in the National
Lottery. Just when the very stability of the Re-
public was beginning to make her political life almost
as dull as that of England, it occurred to some brilliant
mind that many poor people in the provinces ought to
see the Exhibition, and could not come to Paris for
want of means to pay railway fares and hotel bills.
To have proposed that the National Assembly
should vote a large sum for the endowment of
such impecunious curiosity would not have been a
very hopeful project. The Finance Committee, of
which M. Gambetta is the chairman, would have
sternly stood in the way; and even if its virtue had
been overcome, the Monarchical partisans, who have
a majority in the Senate, would have contemptuously
declined to let the money of the State be used to
spread the fame of so very Republican a thing as the
Exhibition. But it was seen that a lottery would be
quite as effective for the purpose as a grant from the
public treasury; so it was arranged that a million
tickets should be sold at a franc apiece, that a crowd
of prizes should be given to the drawers of the lucky
numbers, and that the profits should be used to
pay the expenses of the needy and deserving arti-
sans and peasants who should se accounted worthy
to visit the Champ de Mars. But the original
object of the plan was half forgotten in the midst
of the rush for tickets. A boundless store of the
gambling spirit had been tapped, and out it rushed
with overwhelming volume. One million after another
was added to the number of tickets until at last the
alarmed managers of the adventure, feeling that they
must draw the line somewhere, have drawn it at
twelve millions. Thus £lBO,OOO will have been paid
in francs by people who are reputed to be the most
frueal in the world ; and it is believed that twice
as much could easily be collected if the list were to be
held open. At railway stations, in restaurants and
at bookstalls, by public officials and private ad-
venturers, the tickets have been dangled before
the eyes of every passer-by. Nor has the tempta-
tion to invest a few francs in the purchase!of the little
bits of paper been altonther contemptible. The
pecuniary value of the first prize is £5,000; there are
two second prizes, worth £4,000 each; there are two
third prizes, valued at £2,000 apiece ; and the total
number of rewards reaches the magnificent figure of
230,000. Peasants, workmen domestic servants, and
even children have been case into a fever of excite-
ment by the hope of winning a small fortune for a
franc. People of higher social stations have bought
thousands of the tickets, partly, perhaps, from
a half-humorous feeling of curiosity, but partly,
also, from that love of gambling and that
greed of gain which they share with their poorer
neighbours. To a vast multitude of householders
the day of the drawing will be a time of incomparably
more interest than the occasion of the approaching
Senatorial elections. But, meanwhile, the managers
of the lottery have to face an alarming difficulty
which did not suggest itself when they were distribu-
ting the printed chances of success. It is easy to
speak of 12,000,000 tickets, but they will be a pro-
digious mass when gathered together. How long, it
is asked, will it take to draw the 230,000 prizes?
Clearly, weeks, if not months, would be spent if the
allotments were made in the ordinary way, Marshal
MacMahon's tenure of power might end before a
slowly revolving wheel should cast out the last token
of success. So the mathematical ingenuity of the
French is exerted to find some means of multiplying
the speed without changing the chances. After the
drawing, a new set of difficulties will be presented
by the nature of the articles which make up a
great proportion of the prizes. Yesterday our Paris
Correspondent gave a startling list of embarrassing re-
wards. What would a peasant of the Gironde do with
a locomotive steam-engine, or a church clock, or a
stained glass window, or a cannon? What would an
artisan or a shopkeeper do with a plough, or a boat, or
a statue of life size? A barrel of salted.cod,_a million

pins, an iron gate, a grindstone, a smith's beilows, or a
live monkey would be an awkward possession to a man
about town, a shopkeeper, or a priest. It is true that
all the prizes furnished by the directors of the lottery
themselves may be commuted into money ; but a great
number of the rewards have been presented, and those
gifts must either be taken as they are or left. The
declaration of the prizes will richly contribute to the
national sense of humour, whatever else it may do.
"Much of the same kind of spectacle has, no doubt,
been seen in other Continental countries, and may be
witnessed still. Prussia, although it has now entered
better ways, has at times depended on lotteries for
part of its public revenue. The Papal Treasury was
recruited in the same fashion in the days of the Temporal
Power. Public lotteries are important institutions in
Austria; and they would seem to be a necessity of
existence in Italy. Peasants and artisans, traders and
priests, women and children, buy the fascinating
chances of drawing a great prize. The declaration of the
lucky numbers is made with all the formalities of the
State itself, and in a way startling to English ideas of
decorum A shock is given to the student of Venetian
history when, standing beside the Campanile of St.
Mark's, he sees the loggia of Sansovino—the old
guard-house of the Republican Procurators—periodi-
cally used for so very vulgar a purpose as the an-
nouncement of the prizes which have been drawn in
the gambling lists of the State. Still sharper must
be the surprise when the grand amphitheatre of
Verona is put to the same use with all the pomp of
royalty. Quite recently, when the King and the
Queen happened to be visiting the town, they and the
heir to the throne and the nobles of the Court went
to the old box of the Imperators in that great old
arena, while thousands of the townspeople thronged the
lower tiers of ascending seats in much the same fashion

_
as their remote ancestors might have done in the pre-
sence of Csesar ,• and the occasion of that curious
repetition of a Roman spectacle was the drawing of
the prizes in a public lottery. We have no such exhibi-
tions in this country. But at no distant time the
lottery was almost as much an English as it is now an
Italian institution. For centuries it was annually
licensed by Parliament, and it was sometimes made
attractive by such substantial prizes as terminable and
perpetual annuities. Occasionally the luckiest numbers
carried with them a small fortune. The profits were now
and then used for the execution of public works. The
British Museum is said to be partially indebted to that
strange method of endowing science and learning.
But in time the country was shocked by the licence
and direct encouragement which the spirit of
gambling drew from the State. Parliament itself
interfered with sharp reports; and at last, in 1823,
all kinds of lotteries were put down by law. France
speedily imitated the example of this country by
abolishing, in 1836, a Royal lottery which had taken
the place of private adventures of the same kind sixty
years before.
"It would be somewhat pharisaic, no doubt, to
lecture Continental countries on their passion for
gambling merely because we no longer practice it in
the form which they find most fascinating. They
might retort that nowhere is the passion for
gambling stronger than in England. What, they
tmhieg hdt e
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parison with the passionate ardour of the Stock
Exchange? And where could a more reckless love
of gambling be found than in the national habit of
betting? An Italian might patriotically argue that
the number of bets made in England exceeds the
' number of lottery tickets sold in his country, and that
the mischief caused by any one drawing of those
certificates of chance is trivial compared with the
misery and the ruin which accompany our great
national pastime. But the distinction between the
practice of the two countries is that gambling is
tolerated in the one case only in so far as it can-
not be prevented, while in the other it is licensed
and nourished by the State. We do not wonder
that Italy overlooks that difference in her present
state. She has to think of so many reforms
that she has little time to consider the minor moralities
of public life. But it is startling to find France copy-
ing the bad habit of countries far behind herself in
material comfort and enlightenment. The idea of the
lottery was at first, perhaps, somewhat of a freak, and
it had the comforting gloss of charity; but it has be-
come a serious piece of national machinery, and it has
given a startling encouragement to that spirit of
pecuniary adventure which is nowhere stronger than
in France. It may please the Government to say
that the sale of the tickets has been merely a
momentary occasion of excitement, and that it may be
pardoned in the year of a great Exhibition. But such
a theory is more worthy of an Empire, which must
have recourse to public shows, than of a Republic.
which must rely on public virtue. The Royalists
may say with some complacency that the Constitu-
tional Monarchy put an end to lotteries, and that
the Republic revived the bad practice. The manu-
facture of 12,000,000 encouragements to gamble
will not at least be deemed a masterpiece of states-
manship ; and it is possible to conceive a more dig-
nified spectacle than the Government of a great
country in the act of solving the mathematical
problem how more than two hundred thousand
prizes can be drawn before the end of the Septennate.
Fortunately, the French are richly gifted with the
power of mirth, and, in their ridicule of the pro-
digious proportions to which the lottery has grown,
they may discourage a repetition of the experiment."