Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1884-01-15

feat or pass any measure il chooses, and 1t
thus guards its own interests by conserv-
ing or opposing all others.
The chief of the lottery gamblers boasts
that there is not man in the State he
cannot buy, and it is part OF his history
that at one time he went go far with his
boasting as to publish list OF legislators
to whom he had paid money to support
favorite scheme. An investigation was
once moved of the lottery business it was
killed off and new inquiry ordered. But
on the committee of inquisition appointed
| by the Speaker were no less than three
men who, being in the lottery business,
were themselves to be the subjects of in
vestigstion. OF course nothing came of
such farciosl proceeding.
These charges constitute terrible in
dictment. 1t is probable that they are
fairly accurate, since it is not to be con-
ceived that gambling by lottery could be
carried on apparently by the authority of
sovereign State in civilized country,
except the moral forces in that State are
subject to and under COW by the vicious
influences that attach to the lottery bust
ness, no matter how much it is sugar
coated by State Endorsements and off.
cial guarantees.
Here, then, is a disreputable business
dominating a State, boarding the Postal
Department of the United States Govern.
ment, invoking the protection of its Courts,
and even defying the laws of our own
State, since its money buys the way for its
advertisements into San Francisco news.
papers, in open contempt of the law to the
contrary. 1t makes no reports, it dragnets
annually vast sum of money, pays As per
cent. dividends on It stock, which it waters
from time to time, and taints the whole
community with the gambling fever it
placards the country with its glazing prom
ises of something for nothing, and it is
| charged that the mania has infected even
the clergy; that the school children gam
bic in tickets, parts OF which are sold for
! pennies that the poor narrow their wants
to indulge the passion for gaming by lot
terry that households have been broken
up by the insane propensity wives limit to
meanness their domestic supplies to obtain
means to purchase tickets; and servants
cannot be trusted with money for the mar
ket because the wayside temptations to iu-
vest in lotteries are so strong and so Oh
through longer chapter Of recitals of de-
moralizatioD.
We may readily believe all these things,
because want, wretchedness, social demon
alizAtion, dishonesty and ruin are the natu.
raj colleagues and sequences of the gam
bling mania which has taken on no form
so alluring and so dangerous as when robed
in the guarantee" Of State lottery"
the quasi-ofiicial character making it all
the more potent an agency of evil.
1t is with such power that General
Gresham is now contending. Not only
should the moral sentiment of the country
sustain him, but Congress should uphold
his hands. and, if the thing is possible,
put the seal of its official condemnation
upon the monster he has by the throat. 1t
affords some hope for the grasp of the lot
terry iend being loosened to know that one
political party in Louisiana, recognizing
the inevitable, has pronounced against the
evil but it "a well. known that the infamy
will not down without a severe struggle.
We had season Of the lottery fever in
California few years ago. 1t ragged while
it prevailed with damaging fury, but hap
PLY the people came to their senses in
time, and today there stands upon the
broad page of the Constitution a prohib-
tory decree against lotteries and the sale
of lottery tickets. But lottery tickets are
battered in the State; they are openly ex-
posed for sale on the streets, to the shame
of the statutes. 1t is perfectly easy for
the officers of the law to prevent this-to
make it decidedly Improbable to deal in
these articles. That they Go not do so
may justify the suspicion that the power
of the lottery fend is exercised, and its
corrupting agencies at work ever here.