Chronicles and characters of the stock exchange

by of the Bank of England John Francis

Hitherto, craft and knavery appears to be their method; but we shall trace them now a little farther; and, like true hussars, who plunder not the enemy only, but their own army, as the opportunity presents, so these men are now come to prey upon the government itself.

Let us look into the late lotteries; had not a piercing eye detected the roguery, and not the fall of other things taken off the edge of the people’s fancy for venturing. These artists have brought up the tickets to sixteen shillings apiece, advance, even before the act was passed. That this could not be but by securing the possession of all the tickets in their own hands, except such select tickets as were not to come to market, I say this could not be but by connivance, and this every one knows; and that this connivance again could not be but by some higher people than those that were named to it, this, also, every one may know. Who they were, is none of my business to inquire, though it is easy to guess. It is very hard when our statesmen come into a confederacy to bite the people, and when dukes turn stock-jobbers. Yet that this was done is most certain; and what was this but making a property of the power that might be in their hands, the better to bite the people? For if the Parliament appointed £500,000 in tickets, to be given out at a certain rate that was low and reasonable, was it not to encourage the people, on whom the rest of the national burden lies? And if, by the craft and knavery of jobbers, the people are made to pay £600,000 for them, which is much about the case, pray, why not pay the hundred thousand pounds to the public, either to pay off a hundred thousand pounds of debt, or to make the burden of the current year a hundred thousand pounds lighter?—of which, I am sure, there is need enough.

It has been, indeed, our happiness, that a worthy member, being informed of this abominable cheat, detected it, and laid it before the House; upon which a vote was passed to make void all bargains make for tickets before the act was passed; so the biters were bitten; and a certain Sir George —— was obliged to refund; but the roguery of the design was never a jot the less for that.

But the fatal influence of this growing evil does not end here, and I must trace stock-jobbing now to its new-acquired capacity of intermeddling with the public, assisting rebellion, encouraging invasion; and if I do not bring the stock-jobbers, even the Whigs among them, to be guilty of treason against their king and country, and that of the worst kind, too, then I do nothing.

Had the stock-jobbers been all Jacobites by profession, or had the employment led them by the necessity of their business to put king and nation, and particularly their own, to bargain and sale; and had the feeling of news been their property, and they had an act of Parliament, or patent, to entitle them to the sole privilege of imposing what false things they pleased on the people, I should have had much the less reason to have complained of their roguery, and have rather turned myself to the rest of them people, who are the subject they work upon, and only have stood at Exchange Alley end, and cried out, “Gentlemen, have a care of your pockets.”

Again, had it been a private club, or society of men, acting one among another,—had the cheats, the frauds, and the tricks they made use of, in which the English rogue was a fool to them, being practised upon themselves only, and, like gamesters at a public board, they had only played with those that came there to play with them; in this case, also, I should have held my tongue, and only put them in mind of an old song, every stanza of which chimed in with, “Tantararara, rogues all, rogues all.”

But when we find this trade become a political vice, a public crime, and that, as it is now carried on, it appears dangerous to the public, that, whenever any wickedness is in hand, any mischief by the worst of the nation’s enemies upon the wheel, the stock-jobbers are naturally made assistant to it, that they become abettors of treason, assistant to rebellion and invasion, then it is certainly time to speak, for the very employment becomes a crime, and we are obliged to expose a sort of men who are more dangerous than a whole nation of enemies abroad, an evil more formidable than the pestilence, and, in their practice, more fatal to the public, than an invasion of Spaniards.

It is said by some, that the principal leaders in the jobbing trade at that time, and to whom most part of the satire in this work ought to be pointed, are Whigs, members of Parliament, and friends to the government; and that, therefore, I had best have a care of what I say of them.

My first answer is, So I will. I will have a care of them; and, in the next place, let them have a care of me; for if I should speak the whole truth of some of them, they might be Whigs; but I dare say they would be neither P—— men, or friends to the government very long; and it is very hard his Majesty should not be told what kind of friends to him such men are.

Besides, I deny the fact. These men friends to the government! Jesu Maria! The government may be friendly to them in a manner they do not deserve; but as to their being friends to the government, that is no more possible than the Cardinal Alberoni or the Chevalier de St. George are friends to the government; and, therefore, without reflecting upon persons, naming names, or the like,—there will be no need of names, the dress will describe them,—I lay down this new-fashioned proposition, or postulatum, take it which way you please, that I will make it out by the consequences of what I am going to say.