and earnestly, to withdraw, as soon as may be, all legislative sanction of the lottery system, and to save Rhode Island from the enduring reproach of being among the last States to abandon that system.  The memorialists beg leave to disclaim, in this matter, all personal or political considerations.  They are seeking neither to help nor to hurt any political party.  They contemplate no aggression upon the rights or the character of individuals.  They are engaged in no impracticable scheme of moral reform.  They have no fondness for popular agitation.  They are what they profess to be, citizens of Rhode Island, and it is only in the quality of citizens of Rhode Island, that they now ask the General Assembly to resort to the most operative penal enactments, for the entire suppression of a system which exists, and which can exist only to disgrace the character of the State, and to injure both the morals and the interests of the people.  The memorialists are persuaded that a commanding majority of the citizens of every political party entertain sentiments of decided hostility to all lotteries.  In praying, therefore, for legislative interposition, they feel that they are not in advance of public opinion, that they are not urging the General Assembly to anticipate public opinion, but only to imbody it; to accelerate its salutary impulses, and to augment its healthful vigour.  The constitutional power of the legislature to interfere in the premises being undisputed, the memorialists beg leave to submit, for consideration, a few only of the many reasons which have forced upon their minds the conclusion—­that Rhode Island should lose no time and spare no effort in extirpating the lottery system:—­a system which has already worked extensive evil within her borders; which is repugnant to a cultivated moral sense; and which has been branded, both as illegal and immoral, by some of the most enlightened governments upon earth.  In this connection, it should be stated, that England, and, it is believed, France likewise, have abandoned the lottery system.  Some of the most populous and influential States in this Confederacy have abandoned it.  Massachusetts has abandoned it; Pennsylvania has abandoned it; New York has abandoned it.  Nay more, so hostile were the people of the latter State to the lottery system, that in revising its Constitution a few years since, they adopted a provision which prohibits the Legislature from ever making a lottery grant.  These examples are adduced to show the progress of an enlightened public sentiment upon this subject, and to exhibit the grateful spectacle of governments, differently constituted, exercising their powers for the best interests of the people.  The evils which the lottery system creates, and the evils which it exasperates, are so various and complicated, that the undersigned memorialists cannot attempt an enumeration.  They are so revolting as to furnish no motive for rhetorical exaggeration.  A few only of these evils the undersigned memorialists will now proceed to mention.