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Then, as now, the lottery was a thinly disguised tax, with odds against winning calculated at 35,000 to 1 (today they are about 14 million to 1). In 1808, a Select Committee of the House of Commons argued that:
no mode of raising Money appears to Your Committee so burdensome, so pernicious, and so unproductive; no species of adventure is known, where the chances are so great against the adventurer, none where the infatuation is more powerful, lasting and destructive.
However, the proceeds of the public's eternal optimism were used to help finance national institutions such as the British Museum and Westminster Bridge.
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