THE SPORTING CHANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26640, 10 December 1947, Page 4

THE SPORTING CHANCE

The Hebrews cast lots before the Lord; Augustus Nero financed building projects with lotteries; Queen Elizabeth was a sweepstake patroness in 1659; in the new world schools and churches were, as early as the 17th century, the beneficiaries from gaming enterprises. So much, and a great deal more, the historian tells us about the age-old human proclivity for consulting the gods of chance in the hope of a favourable verdict. The proposal of a London banker and financier that Great Britain should, in the extremity of economic crisis, resort to a lottery in order to reduce debts and taxation and to supplement dollar resources has, therefore, ample precedents. Lotteries provide a relatively painless way of extracting money from a great number of people, and a venture of the magnitude of that proposed by Major Smith would, presumably, be a very payable proposition for the British Treasury. In pre-war years the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes brought into Eire about £5,000,000 a year (of which the hospitals received some 25 per cent) and made a few people rich without leaving a few million other people much the poorer. In New Zealand, a country which has more Blue Laws than most, the State sanctions periodical lotteries of an indifferent type under the euphemistic and highly misleading term of “art” unions; and it is usual for clubs, public house patrons, office and workshop staffs, schools, and the congregations of many churches, to conduct mild gambles with bottles of whisky, sleeping dolls, non-existent gold nuggets and invisible works of art, according to taste, as the lure to the speculator who is willing to risk something for the hope of more. ’ 1 Yet although lotteries can, as it appeal’s, be not only legal but respectable, anti-gamblers need have little fear, and gamblers entertain small hope, that the British Government will soon be selling tickets in a “Mammoth £2,000,000,000 Aid to Britain Consultation.” The first objection to such an endeavour is that while it could be made legal in Great Britain, there would be very little prospect of legalising it throughout the world. Governments, generally speaking, while they betray little hesitation to exploit their own populations for the good of the exchequer, are reluctant to permit other governments to exploit them. There is, after all, a limit to the amount of juice that can be squeezed from a lemon. It is difficult to believe that the governments of foreign nations —or, perhaps, of the Commonwealth — would gladly act as lottery agents for the Government of Great Britain; and still more difficult to envisage the British Government conniving with foreign lottery agents in the illegal distribution of lottery tickets. Yet a lottery of the size proposed could not succeed without foreign sanction or,. alternatively, international law-break-ing. That being so, discussion of

the moral rights and wrongs of lotteries as such becomes somewhat academic. A liking for “ a mild gamble ” is, no doubt, “ human nature.” New Zealanders are reputed to spend about a million a year in external sweepstakes, and they undoubtedly spend many thousands in internal “ art ” unions, aside from millions in other forms of gambling, principally horseracing. This expenditure is not generally productive to the speculators; whether it impairs the moral fibre of the people is for the moralists to debate. But this can be said, that less national virtue will be derived from money gained by sweepstakes than from money earned by the sweat of the brow — and the brow will not be furrowed to the same extent by anxiety. The power of the great British nation to surmount its present difficulties lies not in lotteries but in loyal service in a cause that is worth while.