Chronicles and characters of the stock exchange

by of the Bank of England John Francis

“‘You have, Sir,’ says Subtle, ‘contracted to accept of stock at a high price; East India at 220, Bank at 160, South Sea 120, and the like. Very well. They come to put it upon you, the stock being since fallen. Tell them you cannot take it yet; if they urge your contract, and demand when you will take it, tell them you will take it when you think fit.

“‘If they swagger, call names,—as rogue, cheat, and the like,—tell them, as to that, you are all of a fraternity; there is no great matter in it whether you cheat them, or they cheat you; ’tis as it happens in the way of trade; that it all belongs to the craft; and, as the Devil’s broker, Whiston, said to parson Giffard, tell them you are all of a trade. If they rage, and tell you the Devil will have you, and such as that, tell them they should let the Devil and you alone to agree about that, it is none of their business; but when he comes for you, tell them you would advise them to keep out of the way, or get a protection, as you have against them.

“‘After this, it is supposed they will sue you at law. Then leave it to me; I’ll hang them up for a year or two in our courts; and if ever in that time the stock comes up to the price, we will tender the money in court, demand the stock, and saddle the charges of the suit upon them. Let them avoid it if they can.’

“This is my lawyer’s opinion,” says he to himself, “and I’ll follow it to a tittle; and so we are told he has; and I do not hear that one stock-jobber has begun to sue him yet, or intends it; nor, indeed, dare they do it.”

This experiment, indeed, may teach understanding to every honest man that falls into the clutches of these merciless men, called stock-jobbers; and I give the world this notice, that, in short, not one of their Exchange Alley bargains need be otherwise than thus complied with. And, let these buyers of bear-skins remember it, not a man of them dare go to common law to recover the conditions; nor is any man obliged, farther than he thinks himself obliged in principle, to make good one of his bargains with them. How far principle will carry any man to be just to a common cheat, that has drawn him into a snare, I do not, indeed, know; but I cannot suppose it will go a very great length, where there is so clear, so plain, and so legal a door to get out at.

It must be confessed that, if the projected story of the taking of the Pretender was acted in concert between Rome and Exchange Alley, between my Lord Mar and a certain broker, as fame reports,—either the broker is the devil of a Jacobite, or my Lord the devil of a broker,—it must be acknowledged it was a far-fetched trick, and answered the end in Exchange most admirably.

Nor can all the world tell us any other end that it could answer; for as to the pretences of deluding the imperialists on shore, or the British men-of-war at sea, and so the better to facilitate the escape of the Pretender to Spain, I undertake to prove that this is absurd and ridiculous; for the Pretender was embarked at Netunna, and gone away to sea thirteen days, at least, before this whim of people taken at Voghera was talked of.

As to the amusements among the Courts at Vienna, Paris, and London, they amounted to nothing at all, answered no end; neither prompted any design on one hand, or hindered any thing on the other. In a word, we may challenge the world to tell us any one turn that was served by it, or end answered by it, but this in Exchange Alley.

Nor was this so inconsiderable a design as not to be worth while to form such a juggle, though a great way off; and, as far off as it is, if we may believe the report of those who remember the machines and contrivances of that original of stock-jobbing, Sir F—— C——. There are those who tell us letters have been ordered, by private management, to be written from the East Indies, with an account of the loss of ships which have been arrived there, and the arrival of ships lost; of war with the Great Mogul, when they have been in perfect tranquillity; and of peace with the Great Mogul, when he was come down against the factory of Bengal with one hundred thousand men;—just as it was thought proper to calculate those rumors for the raising and falling of the stock, and when it was for his purpose to buy cheap, or sell dear.

It would be endless to give an account of the subtleties of that capital ch—t, when he had a design to bite the whole Exchange. As he was the leading hand to the market, so he kept it in his power to set the price to all the dealers. The subject then was chiefly the East India stock, though there were other stocks on foot, too, though since sunk to nothing; such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Linen Manufacture stock, Paper stock, Saltpetre stock, and others, all at this day worse than nothing, though some of them then jobbed up to 350 per cent., as the two first in particular.