Report of the National Lottery Competition
THE advisability or the reverse of innovating National Lotteries in England is always in the back of most people's minds, whenever the question of betting is under discussion. We therefore offered a prize of five guineas for the best state- ment in three hundred words of the case for and against a National Lottery. We award the prize to Mr. D. H. Evans for
his lucid, prudent and economically worded entry :-- COMPETITION—NATIONAL LOTTERY.
Gambling is but one portent of that acquisitive instinct common in man, and it is psychologically true that to a greater or lesser extent all men are gamblers born. .
Up to naiw, all cultural effort to rid man of this instinct has failed ; yet each time the suggestion is made to legalize gambling by intro- ducing a National Lottery, gambler and anti-gambler come into contliet.:- • _ With all their disputing, the moral question of whether it is better to give freedom to instinct, or, risk the possibly evil consequences which psychologists tell us follow when instinct is suppressed,, still remains unsettled. Many of us are content to leave it so.
Economically, considered., gambling is a luxury. A luxurfr less taxed than any other in a country where all luxuries are taxed,i which is of particular import when Government are bothered to raise fresh revenue without putting further burdens on vital industries.
Limited to course and-credit-betting, a tax appears unprofitable ; but a Lottery _Bureau at several points in each town would bring to the tax-gatherer millions who formerly Were beyond his reach. If gambling in geed because it satisfies an instinct natural to man, It should be put to adVantage. If it is bad, it should be brought into the light and controlled; not allowed to flourish under cover of a doubtful: tolerance.
A National-Lottery might not solve the whole problem, but it Would at least regularize some of the existing evil irregularities. It would help, too, to clean up sonic, Of the undesirable features attach- ing to that greatest of all gambling mediums, the sports field.
It might at least be tried, and judgment suspended until results are known, results which migbt be quite different here. from those
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