THE EXILED LOTTERY
TWO years ago, while I was passing through Texas, I asked a young man in the smoking-car if he happened to know where I could find the United States troops, who were at that time riding somewhere along the borders of Texas and Mexico, and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza revolution.
The young man did not show that he was either amused or surprised at the abruptness of the question, but answered me promptly, as a matter of course, and with minute detail. “You want to go to San Antonio,” he said, “and take the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary, and then change to the freight that leaves once a day to Corpus Christi, and get off at Pena station. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can hire a horse there and ride to the San Rosario Ranch. Captain Hardie is at Rosario with Troop G, Third Cavalry. They call him the RidingCaptain, and if any one can show you all there is to see in this Garza outfit, he can.”
The locomotive whistle sounded at that moment, the train bumped itself into a full stop at a station, and the young man rose. “Good-day,” he said, smiling pleasantly; “I get off here.”
He was such an authoritative young man, and he had spoken in so explicit a manner, that I did as he had directed; and if the story that followed was not interesting, the fault was mine, and not that of my chance adviser.
A few months ago I was dining alone in Delmonico’s, when the same young man passed out through the room, and stopped on his way beside my table.
“Do you remember me?” he said. “I met you once in a smoking-car in Texas. Well, I’ve got a story now that’s better than any you’ll find lying around here in New York. You want to go to a little bay called Puerto Cortez, on the eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America, and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery there. It used to be the biggest gambling concern in the world, but now it’s been banished to a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-trees, and from there it reaches out all over the United States, and sucks in thousands and thousands of victims like a great octopus. You wantto go there and write a story about it. Good-night,” he added; then he nodded again, with a smile, and walked across the room and disappeared into Broadway.
When a man that you have met once in a smoking-car interrupts you between courses to suggest that you are wasting your time in New York, and that you ought to go to a coral reef in Central America and write a story of an outlawed lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it does not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least, so much that I went back to my rooms at once, and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the map; and later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-plots in Madison Square turned into piled-up islands of snow, surrounded by seas of slippery asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went South to investigate the exiled lottery. That is how this chapter and this book came to be written.
Every one who goes to any theatre in the United States may have read among the advertisements on the programme an oddly worded one which begins, “Conrad! Conrad! Conrad!” and which goes on to say that—
“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis, Miss.“Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to“PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras,“Care Central America Express,“Fort Tampa City,“Florida, U. S. A.”
“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis, Miss.
“Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to
“PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras,
“Care Central America Express,“Fort Tampa City,“Florida, U. S. A.”
You have probably read this advertisement often, and enjoyed the naïve manner in which Mr. Conrad asks for correspondence on different subjects, especially on that relating to “all business communications,” and how at the same time he has so described his whereabouts that no letters so addressed would ever reach his far-away home in Puerto Cortez, but would be promptly stopped at Tampa, as he means that they should.
After my anonymous friend had told me of Puerto Cortez, I read of it on the programme with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became to me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of a certain dark significance, and of possible adventure. I remembered all that the lottery had been before the days of its banishment, and all that it had dared to be when, as a corporation legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it had put its chain and collar upon legislatures and senators, judges and editors, when it had silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit by great gifts of money to charities and hospitals, so giving out in a lump sum with one hand what it had taken from the people in dollars andhalf-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold, with the other. I remembered when its trade-mark, in open-faced type, “La. S. L.,” was as familiar in every newspaper in the United States as were the names of the papers themselves, when it had not been excommunicated by the postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real purpose under a carefully worded paragraph in theatrical programmes or on “dodgers” or handbills that had an existence of a moment before they were swept out into the street, and which, as they were not sent through mails, were not worthy the notice of the federal government.
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 itin 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 consideredas 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.
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 newrestrictions, 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, theleast advanced of all of the Central-American republics, and the most heavily burdened with debt.
THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING
Honduras agreed to receive the exile, and to give it her name and protection for the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year and twenty per cent. of its gross earnings. It would seem that this to a country that has not paid the intereston her national debt for twelve years was a very advantageous bargain; but as four presidents and as many revolutions and governments have appeared and disappeared in the two years in which the lottery people have received their charter in Honduras, the benefit of the arrangement to them has not been an obvious one, and it was not until two years ago that the first drawing of the lottery was held at Puerto Cortez. The company celebrated this occasion with a pitiful imitation of its former pomp and ceremony, and there was much feasting and speech-making, and a special train was run from the interior to bring important natives to the ceremonies. But the train fell off the track four times, and was just a day late in consequence. The young man who had charge of the train told me this, and he also added that he did not believe in lotteries.
During these two years, when representatives of the company were taking rides of nine days each to the capital to overcome the objections of the new presidents who had sprung into office while these same representatives had been making their return trip to the coast, others were seeking a foothold for the company in the United States. The need of this was obvious and imperative. The necessity which had been forced upon them of holding the drawings out of this country, and of giving up the old name andtrade-mark, was serious enough, though it had been partially overcome. It did not matter where they spun their wheel; but if the company expected to live, there must be some place where it could receive its mail and distribute its tickets other than the hot little Honduranian port, locked against all comers by quarantine for six months of the year, and only to be reached during the other six by a mail that arrives once every eight days.
The lottery could not entirely overcome this difficulty, of course, but through the aid of the express companies of this country it was able to effect a substitute, and through this cumbersome and expensive method of transportation its managers endeavored to carry on the business which in the days when the post-office helped them had brought them in twenty thousand letters in twenty-four hours. They selected for their base of operations in the United States the port of Tampa, in the State of Florida—that refuge of prize-fighters and home of unhappy Englishmen who have invested in the swamp-lands there, under the delusion that they were buying town sites and orange plantations, and which masquerades as a winter resort with a thermometer that not infrequently falls below freezing. So Tampa became their home; and though the legislature of that state proved incorruptible, so the lottery people themselves tell me, there was at least anunderstanding between them and those in authority that the express company was not to be disturbed, and that no other lottery was to have a footing in Florida for many years to come.
If Puerto Cortez proved interesting when it was only a name on a theatre programme, you may understand to what importance it grew when it could not be found on the map of any steamship company in New York, and when no paper of that city advertised dates of sailing to that port. For the first time Low’s Exchange failed me and asked for time, and the ubiquitous Cook & Sons threw up their hands, and offered in desperation and as a substitute a comfortable trip to upper Burmah or to Mozambique, protesting that Central America was beyond even their finding out. Even the Maritime Exchange confessed to a much more intimate knowledge of the west coast of China than of the little group of republics which lies only a three or four days’ journey from the city of New Orleans. So I was forced to haunt the shipping-offices of Bowling Green for days together, and convinced myself while so engaged that that is the only way properly to pursue the study of geography, and I advise every one to try it, and submit the idea respectfully to instructors of youth. For you will find that by the time you have interviewed fifty shipping-clerks, and learned from them where they can set you down and pick youup and exchange you to a fruit-vessel or coasting steamer, you will have obtained an idea of foreign ports and distances which can never be gathered from flat maps or little revolving globes. I finally discovered that there was a line running from New York and another from New Orleans, the fastest steamer of which latter line, as I learned afterwards, was subsidized by the lottery people. They use it every month to take their representatives and clerks to Puerto Cortez, when, after they have held the monthly drawing, they steam back again to New Orleans or Tampa, carrying with them the list of winning numbers and the prizes.
It was in the boat of this latter line that we finally awoke one morning to find her anchored in the harbor of Puerto Cortez.
The harbor is a very large one and a very safe one. It is encircled by mountains on the sea-side, and by almost impenetrable swamps and jungles on the other. Close around the waters of the bay are bunches and rows of the cocoanut palm, and a village of mud huts covered with thatch. There is also a tin custom-house, which includes the railroad-office and a comandancia, and this and the jail or barracks of rotting whitewashed boards, and the half-dozen houses of one story belonging to consuls and shipping agents, are the only other frame buildings in the place save one. That is a large mansion with broadverandas, painted in colors, and set in a carefully designed garden of rare plants and manaca palms. Two poles are planted in the garden, one flying the blue-and-white flag of Honduras, the other with the stripes and stars of the United States. This is the home of the exiled lottery. It is the most pretentious building and the cleanest in the whole republic of Honduras, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific slope.
I confess that I was foolish enough to regard this house of magnificent exterior, as I viewed it from the wharf, as seriously as a general observes the ramparts and defences of the enemy before making his advance. I had taken a nine days’ journey with the single purpose of seeing and getting at the truth concerning this particular building, and whether I was now to be viewed with suspicion and treated as an intruder, whether my object would be guessed at once and I should be forced to wait on the beach for the next steamer, or whether I would be received with kindness which came from ignorance of my intentions, I could not tell. And while I considered, a black Jamaica negro decided my movements for me. There was a hotel, he answered, doubtfully, but he thought it would be better, if Mr. Barross would let me in, to try for a room in the Lottery Building.
“Mr. Barross sometimes takes boarders,” he said, “and the Lottery Building is a fine house,sir—finest house this side Mexico city.” He added, encouragingly, that he spoke English “very good,” and that he had been in London.
Sitting on the wide porch of the Lottery Building was a dark-faced, distinguished-looking little man, a creole apparently, with white hair and white goatee. He rose and bowed as I came up through the garden and inquired of him if he was the manager of the lottery, Mr. Barross, and if he could give me food and shelter. The gentleman answered that he was Mr. Barross, and that he could and would do as I asked, and appealed with hospitable warmth to a tall, handsome woman, with beautiful white hair, to support him in his invitation. Mrs. Barross assented kindly, and directed her servants to place a rocking-chair in the shade, and requested me to be seated in it; luncheon, she assured me, would be ready in a half-hour, and she hoped that the voyage south had been a pleasant one.
And so within five minutes after arriving in the mysterious harbor of Puerto Cortez I found myself at home under the roof of the outlawed lottery, and being particularly well treated by its representative, and feeling particularly uncomfortable in consequence. I was heartily sorry that I had not gone to the hotel. And so, after I had been in my room, I took pains to ascertain exactly what my position in the house might be, and whether or not, apart from thecourtesy of Mr. Barross and his wife, for which no one could make return, I was on the same free footing that I would have been in a hotel. I was assured that I was regarded as a transient boarder, and that I was a patron rather than a guest; but as I did not yet feel at ease, I took courage, and explained to Mr. Barross that I was not a coffee-planter or a capitalist looking for a concession from the government, but that I was in Honduras to write of what I found there. Mr. Barross answered that he knew already why I was there from the New Orleans papers which had arrived in the boat with me, and seemed rather pleased than otherwise to have me about the house. This set my mind at rest, and though it may not possibly be of the least interest to the reader, it is of great importance to me that the same reader should understand that all which I write here of the lottery was told to me by the lottery people themselves, with the full knowledge that I was going to publish it. And later, when I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Duprez, the late editor of theStates, in New Orleans, and then in Tegucigalpa, as representative of the lottery, I warned him in the presence of several of our friends to be careful, as I would probably make use of all he told me. To which he agreed, and continued answering questions for the rest of the evening. I may also add that I have taken care to verify the figures used here,for the reason that the lottery people are at such an obvious disadvantage in not being allowed by law to reply to what is said of them, nor to correct any mistake in any statements that may be made to their disadvantage.
I had never visited a hotel or a country-house as curious as the one presided over by Mr. Barross. It was entirely original in its decoration, unique in its sources of entertainment, and its business office, unlike most business offices, possessed a peculiar fascination. The stationery for the use of the patrons, and on which I wrote to innocent friends in the North, bore the letter-head of the Honduras Lottery Company; the pictures on the walls were framed groups of lottery tickets purchased in the past by Mr. Barross, which hadnotdrawn prizes; and the safe in which the guest might place his valuables contained a large canvas-bag sealed with red wax, and holding in prizes for the next drawing seventy-five thousand dollars.
Wherever you turned were evidences of the peculiar business that was being carried on under the roof that sheltered you, and outside in the garden stood another building, containing the printing-presses on which the lists of winning numbers were struck off before they were distributed broadcast about the world. But of more interest than all else was the long, sunshiny, empty room running the full length of the house,in which, on a platform at one end, were two immense wheels, one of glass and brass, and as transparent as a bowl of goldfish, and the other closely draped in a heavy canvas hood laced and strapped around it, and holding sealed and locked within its great bowels one hundred thousand paper tickets in one hundred thousand rubber tubes. In this atmosphere and with these surroundings my host and hostess lived their life of quiet conventional comfort—a life full of the lesser interests of every day, and lighted for others by their most gracious and kindly courtesy and hospitable good-will. When I sat at their table I was always conscious of the great wheels, showing through the open door from the room beyond like skeletons in a closet; but it was not so with my host, whose chief concern might be that our glasses should be filled, nor with my hostess, who presided at the head of the table—which means more than sitting there—with that dignity and charm which is peculiar to a Southern woman, and which made dining with her an affair of state, and not one of appetite.
I had come to see the working of a great gambling scheme, and I had anticipated that there might be some difficulty put in the way of my doing so; but if the lottery plant had been a cider-press in an orchard I could not have been more welcome to examine and to study it and to take it to pieces. It was not so much thatthey had nothing to conceal, or that now, while they are fighting for existence, they would rather risk being abused than not being mentioned at all. For they can fight abuse; they have had to do that for a long time. It is silence and oblivion that they fear now; the silence that means they are forgotten, that their arrogant glory has departed, that they are only a memory. They can fight those who fight them, but they cannot fight with people who, if they think of them at all, think of them as already dead and buried. It was neither of these reasons that gave me free admittance to the workings of the lottery; it was simply that to Mr. and Mrs. Barross the lottery was a religion; it was the greatest charitable organization of the age, and the purest philanthropist of modern times could not have more thoroughly believed in his good works than did Mrs. Barross believe that noble and generous benefits were being bestowed on mankind at every turn of the great wheel in her back parlor.
This showed itself in the admiration which she shares with her husband for the gentlemen of the company, and their coming once a month is an event of great moment to Mrs. Barross, who must find it dull sometimes, in spite of the great cool house, with its many rooms and broad porches, and gorgeous silk hangings over the beds, and the clean linen, and airy, sunlit dining-room. She is much more interested in tellingthe news that the gentlemen brought down with them when they last came than in the result of the drawing, and she recalls the compliments they paid her garden, but she cannot remember the number that drew the capital prize. It was interesting to find this big gambling scheme in the hands of two such simple, kindly people, and to see how commonplace it was to them, how much a matter of routine and of habit. They sang its praises if you wished to talk of it, but they were more deeply interested in the lesser affairs of their own household. And at one time we ceased discussing it to help try on the baby’s new boots that had just arrived on the steamer, and patted them on the place where the heel should have been to drive them on the extremities of two waving fat legs. We all admired the tassels which hung from them, and which the baby tried to pull off and put in his mouth. They were bronze boots with black buttons, and the first the baby had ever worn, and the event filled the home of the exiled lottery with intense excitement.
In the cool of the afternoon Mr. Barross sat on the broad porch rocking himself in a big bentwood chair and talked of the civil war, in which he had taken an active part, with that enthusiasm and detail with which only a Southerner speaks of it, not knowing that to this generation in the North it is history, and something of which onereads in books, and is not a topic of conversation of as fresh interest as the fall of Tammany or the Venezuela boundary dispute. And as we listened we watched Mrs. Barross moving about among her flowers with a sunshade above her white hair and holding her train in her hand, stopping to cut away a dead branch or to pluck a rose or to turn a bud away from the leaves so that it might feel the sun.
And inside, young Barross was going over the letters which had arrived with the morning’s steamer, emptying out the money that came with them on the table, filing them away, and noting them as carefully and as methodically as a bank clerk, and sealing up in return the little green and yellow tickets that were to go out all over the world, and which had been paid for by clerks on small salaries, laboring-men of large families, idle good-for-nothings, visionaries, born gamblers and ne’er-do-wells, and that multitude of others of this world who want something for nothing, and who trust that a turn of luck will accomplish for them what they are too listless and faint-hearted and lazy ever to accomplish for themselves. It would be an excellent thing for each of these gamblers if he could look in at the great wheel at Puerto Cortez, and see just what one hundred thousand tickets look like, and what chance his one atom of a ticket has of forcing its way to the top of that great mass at the exactmoment that the capital prize rises to the surface in the other wheel. He could have seen it in the old days at the Charles Theatre, and he is as free as is any one to see it to-day at Puerto Cortez; but I should think it would be unfortunate for the lottery if any of its customers became too thorough a student of the doctrine of chances.
The room in which the drawings are held is about forty feet long, well lighted by many long, wide windows, and with the stage upon which the wheels stand blocking one end. It is unfurnished, except for the chairs and benches, upon which the natives or any chance or intentional visitors are welcome to sit and to watch the drawing. The larger wheel, which holds, when all the tickets are sold, the hopes of one hundred thousand people, is about six feet in diameter, with sides of heavy glass, bound together by a wooden tire two feet wide. This tire or rim is made of staves, formed like those of a hogshead, and in it is a door a foot square. After the tickets have been placed in their little rubber jackets and shovelled into the wheel, this door is locked with a padlock, and strips of paper are pasted across it and sealed at each end, and so it remains until the next drawing. One hundred thousand tickets in rubber tubes an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide take up a great deal of space, and make such an appreciabledifference in the weight of the wheel that it requires the efforts of two men pulling on the handles at either side to even budge it. Another man and myself were quite satisfied when we had put our shoulders to it and had succeeded in turning it a foot or two. But it was interesting to watch the little black tubes with even that slow start go slipping and sliding down over the others, leaving the greater mass undisturbed and packed together at the bottom as a wave sweeps back the upper layer of pebbles on a beach. This wheel was manufactured by Jackson & Sharp, of Wilmington, Delaware. The other wheel is much smaller, and holds the prizes. It was made by John Robinson, of Baltimore.
Whenever there is a drawing, General W. L. Cabell, of Texas, and Colonel C. J. Villere, of Louisiana, who have taken the places of the late General Beauregard and of the late General Early, take their stand at different wheels, General Cabell at the large and Colonel Villere at the one holding the prizes. They open the doors which they had sealed up a month previous, and into each wheel a little Indian girl puts her hand and draws out a tube. The tube holding the ticket is handed to General Cabell, and the one holding the prize won is given to Colonel Villere, and they read the numbers aloud and the amount won six times, three times in Spanish and three times in English, on the principleprobably of the man in the play who had only one line, and who spoke that twice, “so that the audience will know I am saying it.”
The two tickets are then handed to young Barross, who fastens them together with a rubber band and throws them into a basket for further reference. Three clerks with duplicate books keep tally of the numbers and of the prizes won. The drawing begins generally at six in the morning and lasts until ten, and then, everybody having been made rich, the philanthropists and generals and colonels and Indian girls—and, let us hope, the men who turned the wheel—go in to breakfast.
So far as I could see, the drawings are conducted with fairness. But with only 3434 prizes and 100,000 tickets the chances are so infinitesimal and the advantage to the company so enormous that honesty in manipulating the wheel ceases to be a virtue, and becomes the lottery’s only advertisement.
THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS
But what is most interesting about the lottery at present is not whether it is or it is not conducted fairly, but that it should exist at all; that its promoters should be willing to drag out such an existence at such a price and in so fallen a state. This becomes all the more remarkable because the men who control the lottery belong to a class which, as a rule, cares for the good opinion of its fellows, and is willing to sacrifice much to retain it. But the lottery people do not seem anxious for the good opinion of any one, and they have made such vast sums of money in the past, and they have made it so easily, that they cannot release their hold on the geese that are laying the golden eggs for them, even though they find themselves exiled and excommunicated by their own countrymen. If they were thimble-riggers or Confidence men in need of money their persistence would not appear so remarkable, but these gentlemen of the lottery are men of enormous wealth, their daughters are in what is called society in New Orleans and in New York, their sons are at the universities, and they themselves belong to those clubs most difficultof access. One would think that they had reached that point when they could say “we are rich enough now, and we can afford to spend the remainder of our lives in making ourselves respectable.” Becky Sharp is authority for the fact that it is easy to be respectable on as little as five hundred pounds a year, but these gentlemen, having many hundreds of thousands of pounds, are not even willing to make the effort. Two years ago, when, according to their own account, they were losing forty thousand dollars a month, and which, after all, is only what they once cleared in a day, and when they were being driven out of one country after another, like the cholera or any other disease, it seems strange that it never occurredto them to stop fighting, and to get into a better business while there was yet time.
Even the keeper of a roulette wheel has too much self-respect to continue turning when there is only one man playing against the table, and in comparison with him the scramble of the lottery company after the Honduranian tin dollar, and the scant savings of servant-girls and of brakesmen and negro barbers in the United States, is to me the most curious feature of this once great enterprise.
What a contrast it makes with those other days, when the Charles Theatre was filled from boxes to gallery with the “flower of Southern chivalry and beauty,” when the band played, and the major-generals proclaimed the result of the drawings. It is hard to take the lottery seriously, for the day when it was worthy of abuse has passed away. And, indeed, there are few men or measures so important as to deserve abuse, while there is no measure if it be for good so insignificant that it is not deserving the exertion of a good word or a line of praise and gratitude.
And only the emotion one can feel for the lottery now is the pity which you might have experienced for William M. Tweed when, as a fugitive from justice, he sat on the beach at Santiago de Cuba and watched a naked fisherman catch his breakfast for him beyond the first line of breakers, or that you might feel for Monte Carlo wereit to be exiled to a fever-stricken island off the swampy coast of West Africa, or, to pay the lottery a very high compliment indeed, that which you give to that noble adventurer exiled to the Isle of Elba.
There was something almost pathetic to me in the sight of this great, arrogant gambling scheme, that had in its day brought the good name of a state into disrepute, that had boasted of the prices it paid for the honor of men, and that had robbed a whole nation willing to be robbed, spinning its wheel in a back room in a hot, half-barbarous country, and to an audience of gaping Indians and unwashed Honduranian generals. Sooner than fall as low as that it would seem to be better to fall altogether; to own that you are beaten, that the color has gone against you too often, and, like that honorable gambler and gentleman, Mr. John Oakhurst, who “struck a streak of bad luck, about the middle of February, 1864,” to put a pistol to your head, and go down as arrogantly and defiantly as you had lived.[A]