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presentation and debate on each report
seriatim.
Delegate Sherbow.
DELEGATE SHERBOW: Mr. Chairman
and ladies and gentlemen of the Committee
of the Whole: We will shortly have four
reports of the Committee on State Finance
and Taxation; the first is the report on
lotteries, which is SF-2.
Thereafter, we will take up the report
dealing with taxes and assessments, which
is SF-3, and this will be presented to you
by Delegate Case, who is the Vice-Chair-
man of our Committee on State Finance
and Taxation.
Then we will have SF-4, which deals
with State indebtedness, and then SF-5,
dealing with budget and appropriations,
the latter two of which I will present to
you.
We are now dealing with our proposal
relating to the subject of lotteries. Our pro-
posal is very brief. It contains a total of
twelve words, and it says "Lotteries shall
not be sanctioned by the State or its
political subdivisions."
You will find some new language in this
recommendation, because for the first time
in dealing with the subject of lotteries yon
see the State or its political subdivisions
and this I will go into in a moment or two.
First, let me give you a very brief his-
tory of the subject of lotteries. Much of
this you are aware of, all of you have read
and undoubtedly re-read the report of the
Commission dealing with the Convention
and its comment on the subject of lotteries.
But briefly, its history g-oes back into
Colonial days when in order to finance
various enterprises, some of a civic and
some of a religious nature, we had in the
State of Maryland various forms of
lotteries.
The State would grant to a particular
group or to an institution the right to sell
lottery tickets for the purpose of raising
money for the construction of some build-
ing in some worthy cause. One of the pur-
poses of these lotteries was rather simple,
it enabled those dealing with sectarian in-
stitutions to call on others of different
faiths to help them in the hope and with
the possibility that they might in some way
gain by reason of the purchase of the lot-
tery ticket.
They were really for community pur-
poses, but as they increased in size, they
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ceased to be community projects. Competi-
tion began between those who were selling:
lottery tickets for one enterprise, and those
who were selling them for another.
Then it became necessary for the legis-
lature to extend the life of one lottery after
another. I suppose the one you have heard
most about is the Washington Monument
Lottery. It was authorized in 1810. In 1820
it was still in operation. Finally in 1829
it was completed and the only way they
could complete it was for the General As-
sembly to grant $178,000.
The lottery did not itself produce the
necessary funds. Too much of it went into
the pockets of those who were running the
lottery.
Then there came over the years what we
see happening all over this country and
elsewhere; where there were easy pickings,
in marched the organized gamblers. They
were the ones who could come in and what
started out as a good enterprise, so they
thought, became wrecked by reason of what
they were doing.
We found that in Maryland we were hav-
ing a pretty bad time of it, but it took a
governor of New York a long, long time
later to sum it up when he said, dealing
with the history of lotteries: "Throughout
its entire history in the United States and
abroad, legalized gambling has brought
nothing but poverty, crime and corruption."
This is the statement of Governor Thomas
E. Dewey of New York.
The legislature as early as 1792 in Mary-
land found that it had to regulate lotteries.
By late 1834 they had become such an ac-
knowledged evil in Maryland that efforts
were under way to suppress them.
The efforts continued, but it took 20 more
years before they could get legislation
through to end them, but like the phase-
outs that are supposed to be taking place
in some parts of Maryland on other mat-
ters, even the adoption of a constitutional
prohibition against lottery proved ineffec-
tive for a long while, because there were
lotteries still in effect whose life had not
expired.
It was not until 1860 long after the
efforts had been put on the statute books,
that the General Assembly succeeded in
bringing about the suppression of the
lottery.
What we are dealing with in this par-
ticular matter before you today is this situ-
ation. If you approve the recommendation
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