Here and There in London

Do my readers know Shoreditch? I do not mean the Eastern Counties Railway Station, but the regions dark and dolorous lying beyond. In an old map of London, by my side, dated 1560, I see it marked as a street with but one row of houses on each side, and the five windmills in Finsbury Fields not far off. Here stood the Curtain Theatre. In Stowe’s time there were in Shoreditch “two publique houses for the acting and shewe of comedies, tragedies, and histories for recreation.” Here, according to the learned and indefatigable Mr. Timbs, “at the Blue Last public-house, porter was first sold, about 1730.” And here still, if I may judge from the immense number of public-houses all round, the consumption of porter and other intoxicating liquors is still carried on on a somewhat extensive scale. Hard working and businesslike as Shoreditch is by day, with its clothes marts and extensive shoe depôts, by night it is a great place for amusement. Here are theatres where melodrama reigns supreme. Close by is the renowned Britannia Saloon. And here concerts exist where, over their beer, the listeners are regaled with the sentimental and comic songs of a generation long gathered to its fathers. To me I confess there is somewhat of pathos in these places. What tales cannot that ancient landlord tell! The young, the beautiful, the brave he has outlived, where are they?

But let us pass on to the penny theatre, a place not hard to find in this region of shell-fish and fruit-pie shops, those sure indications of a neighbourhood rather poor and very wild. We pay our money at the door, and then follow the direction given us by the businesslike young woman who takes the fee, “First turn to the left, and then to the right.” But instead of being allowed to enter at once, we have to wait with several others, chiefly boys, very dirty, who regard us apparently with no very favourable eye, till a fresh house is formed. Our new acquaintances are not talkative, and we are not sorry when our turn comes to enter the dirty hole set apart for the entertainment of the Shoreditch youth. We climb up a primitive staircase, and find ourselves in a gallery of the rudest description, a privilege for which we have to pay a penny extra. Here we have an ample view of the stage and the pit, the latter chiefly filled with boys, very dirty, and full of fun, with the usual proportion of mothers with excited babies. The performance commences with a panorama of American scenery, with some very stale American criticisms, about the man who was so tall that he had to go up a ladder to shave himself, and so on; all, however, exciting much mirth amongst the youthful and apple-eating audience. Then a young lady, with very short petticoats and very thick ancles, dances, and takes all hearts by storm. To her succeeds one who sings about true love, but not in a manner which the Shoreditch youthdom affects. Then a fool comes upon the stage, and keeps the pit in a roar, especially when he directs his wit to the three musicians who form the orchestra, and says ironically to one of them, “You could not drink a quartern of gin, could you?” and the way in which the allusion was received evidently implied that the enlightened but juvenile audience around me evidently had a very low opinion of a man who could not toss off his quartern of gin. Then we had the everlasting niggers, with the bones, and curiously-wrought long coats, and doubtful dialect, and perpetual laughter, which the excited pit copiously rewarded. One boy tossed a button on the stage, another a copper, and another an apple; and so pleasing was this liberality to the supposed young men of African descent, that they did not think it beneath them, or inconsistent with their dignity as professionals, to encourage it in every possible way. And well they might. Those gay blacks very likely had little white faces at home dependent on the liberality of the house for next day’s crust. But the treat of the evening was a screaming farce, in one act, in which the old tale of “Taming the Shrew” was set forth in the most approved Shoreditch fashion. A husband comes upon the stage, whose wife – I would not be ungallant, but conscientious regard to truth compels me sorrowfully to declare – is an unmitigated shrew. She lords it over her husband as no good woman ever did or wishes to do. The poor man obeys till he can stand it no longer. At length all his manhood is aroused. Armed with what he calls a persuader – a cudgel of most formidable pretensions – he astonishes his wife with his unexpected resistance. She tries to regain the mastery, but in vain; and great is the delight of all as the husband, holding his formidable instrument over his cowed and trembling wife, compels her to obey his every word. All the unwashed little urchins around me were furious with delight. There was no need for the husband to tell the audience, as he did, as the moral of the piece, that the best remedy for a bad wife was to get such another cudgel for her as that he held in his hand. It was quite clear the little Britons around me had resolved how they would act; and I fear, as they passed out to the number of about 200, few of them did not resolve, as soon as they had the chance, to drink their quartern of gin and to whop their wives.

On another occasion it chanced to me to visit a penny gaff in that dark and dolorous region, the New Cut. There the company and the entertainment were of a much lower character. A great part of the proceedings were indecent and disgusting, yet very satisfactory to the half-grown girls and boys present. In the time of the earlier Georges we read much of the brutality of the lower orders. If we may believe contemporary writers on men and manners, never was the theatre so full – never was the audience so excited – never did the scum and refuse of the streets so liberally patronise the entertainment as when deeds of violence and blood were the order of the night. This old savage spirit is dying out, but in the New Cut I fear it has not given way to a better one.

RAG FAIR

People often ask, how do the poor live in London. This a question I don’t intend answering on the present occasion. But if you ask how they clothe themselves, my answer is, at Rag Fair. Do my readers remember Dickens’s sketch of Field-lane? In “Oliver Twist,” he writes, “Near to the spot at which Snow-hill and Holborn meet there opens, on the right hand as you come out of the city, a dark and dismal alley, leading to Saffron-hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of pocket handkerchiefs of all sizes and patterns, for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets; hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows, or flaunting from the door-posts, and the shelves within are filled with them. Confined as the limits of Field-lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself – the emporium of petty larceny, visited at early morning and setting in of dusk by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back parlours, and go as strangely as they come. Here the clothes-man, the shoe vamper, and the rag merchant display their goods as signboards to the petty thief, and stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen, stuff, and linen rust and rot in the grimy cellars.” Expand this picture. Instead of one street have several – make it the resort of all the dealers in old clo’, old iron, old rags, old tools, old bones, old anything that a human creature can sell or buy; fill it with a miscellaneous crowd of Jews, Irish, navvies, artisans, pickpockets, and thieves, bargaining with all the energy of which their natures are susceptible; make it damp and warm with their vapour, and a very Babel with their discordant sounds, and you get a dim idea of Rag Fair and its guests, unwashed as they appear every day from twelve to two, but especially on a Sunday, to the great scandal of the devout and respectable in that locality, who are too apt to quarrel with the effect and forget the cause.

Let us enter Houndsditch, a place where the Jews collected together long before the royal house of Guelph occupied its present pleasant position on the English throne. Poverty and wretchedness, it may be, are bashful at the West End, but they are not so here,

“Where no contiguous palace rears its head,
To mark the meanness of their humble shed.”

In a little court on our left, a little way down, we come to a building known as the Old Clothes Exchange. The building was erected some dozen years ago by one of the leading merchants in the old clothes line. A small entrance fee is demanded. You had better pay, as otherwise admission will be denied you. You had better not attempt to pass in without paying, as the toll-collector is an ex-prize-fighter; and the chances are, in a set-to, you would come off second best. If it be Sunday you had better not, especially if the weather be warm, attempt a passage at all. The scrambling, and wedging, and pushing, and driving are dreadful. A man must have some nerve who forces his way in. In the week day, and you are a seller, you are soon pounced on by the Jews hungering and thirsting after bargains. In that peculiar dialect affected by the ancient people you have the most magnificent offers made. “My coot friend, have you cot any preakage?” says one. “Cot any old boots?” says another. “I alvays gives a coot prishe,” says a third. And the seller is surrounded by an eager crowd, as if he had the Koh-i-noor, and was going to part with it dirt cheap. If you are a buyer, you are quite as quickly attacked. “Want a new hat?” says one. “Shall I sell you a coot coat?” says another; and whichever way you turn, you see the same buying and selling. The cheap jewellery, the china ornaments, the general wares, are not of the most recherché, but of the most popular character. You may buy a stock close by that will set up all the fairs in England. Here a seller of crockery ware has come back, and is disposing of the treasures he has acquired in the course of his travels. There a woman is discharging a similar miscellaneous cargo. All round are buyers, examining their goods. Everything here will be made useful. That bit of old iron will become new; those boots, ruined, as you deemed them, will be vamped up, and shall dance merrily to accompanying shillalaghs at Donnybrook fair; that resplendent vest, once the delight of Belgravia, in a few weeks will adorn Quashie as he serenades his Mary Blane beneath West Indian moons. Even those bits of waste leather will be carefully treasured up and converted into a dye that may tint the rich man’s costly robe. Now, you need not wonder why you find suspicious-looking men and women bargaining with your servants for left-off clothes, or rags, or plunder of any kind, and you are not surprised when you hear even out of this dirty trade riches are made, and the gains are great.

A wit was once asked what he thought of Ireland. “Why,” was his answer, “I never knew before what the people of England did with their cast-off clothes.” A similar remark might be made with regard to Rag Fair. But we have not yet described the locality. Very dark and very dismal, but very much inclined to do business, the Exchange, as it is termed, is not a building of a very gorgeous style of architecture. In its erection the useful and the economical evidently was considered more than the beautiful. It seems destitute alike of shape and substance. Mr. Mayhew says it consists of a plot of ground about an acre in extent; but Mr. Mayhew has certainly fallen into error here. The place is scarcely fenced in; and here and there you come to a hoarding, in the inside of which are some stalls and benches, scarce covered from the rain – others not so. Some of these benches, all looking very dirty and greasy, are ranged back to back, and here sit the sellers of old clothes, with their unsightly and unsavoury store of garments strewn or piled on the ground at their feet, while between the rows of petty dealers pass the merchant buyers on the look-out for bargains, or the workman, equally inclined to get as much as possible for his penny. But the curious spectator must not stop here. Near is the “City Clothes Emporium,” and all the streets and alleys in the neighbourhood are similarly occupied. The place has the appearance of a foreign colony. They are not Saxon names you see, nor Saxon eyes that look wistfully at you, nor Saxon dialects you hear, but Hebrew. Every street around is part and parcel of the fair, the bazaar is but one section of the immense market which is here carried on; but let the anxious inquirer not be too curious or too lost in wonder, else some prying hand may be inserted into his pocket, and the loss of a handkerchief, or even of something else more valuable, may be the result of a visit to Rag Fair, a place unparalleled in this vast city for rags, and dirt, and seeming wretchedness. It is true that part of the nuisance is done away with. The police keep a close look-out on a Sunday, and a great portion of the traffic on that day is very properly stopped. But there are greater nuisances in the neighbourhood on the Sabbath which the police do not look after, but which they might.

THE COMMERCIAL ROAD

AND THE COAL-WHIPPERS

The Commercial Road, abutting on the Docks and Whitechapel, is the residence of the London coal whippers – a race of men singularly unfortunate – the complete slaves of the publicans of that quarter, and deserving universal sympathy. I have been down in their wretched homes; I have seen father, mother, children all sleeping, eating, living in one small apartment, ill-ventilated, inconvenient, and unhealthy; and I believe no class of labourers in this great metropolis, where so many thousands are ill-paid and hard-worked, and are reduced almost to the condition of brutes, suffer more than the coal-whippers you meet in that busy street of traffic and toil – the Commercial Road.

The coal-whippers are men employed to whip the coals out of the colliers into the barges, which latter bring them up for the supply of the inhabitants of London. Theirs is a precarious and laborious life, and therefore they have special claims upon the consideration of the public. Mr. Deering tells us “it may possibly serve to bespeak interest in the subject if it be known that it is one which affects for weal or for woe no fewer than 10,000 persons, there being nearly 2,000 coal-whippers, together with their wives and families.” From the opening of the coal-whippers’ office in 1843 to the close of 1850, the quantity of coals delivered through it was 16,864,613¼ tons, and the amount of wages paid to the men during that time was £589,180 11s. 5¾d. At times these men have to wait long without employment, sometimes a ship only breaks bulk, and a small quantity of coal is taken out, sometimes the whole cargo is worked right out. Thus the men’s remuneration varies. In some cases a coal-whipper earns but 8s. 9d. a week, and in none more than 16s. Let us now speak of the work. As we have already intimated, that is very hard. It is carried on by gangs of nine, four work in the hold of the ship and fill the basket, four work on the ways, and whip the coal – that is, raise the basket to the top – and one, the basket man, turns it into the meter’s box. The four on the whip have very hard work, and after twelve or fourteen tons have been raised go down into the hold, where they are choked with coal dust, but have not quite so difficult a task. Men who are employed in this labour describe it as most laborious and irksome. Nor from their description can we well conceive it to be otherwise.

Under the old system these men got all their work through the public-house. That was a fearful system. We have heard coal-whippers speak of it as “slavery, tyranny, and degradation;” and well they might. “The only coves who got the work,” as one man told us, “were the Lushingtons.” If a man did not spend his money at the public-house he got no employment; and actually we heard in one case of a landlady who turned off a gang in the middle of their work because they would not spend so much money in her public-house as she thought desirable. One publican who had several of these gangs under his thumb, by various exactions, we were positively assured, made as much as £35 per week by them. The publicans, says Mr. Deering, the able and intelligent secretary to the commissioners, compelled every man to pay on an average to the amount of eight shillings, and in some instances ten shillings, per week for liquor on shore and on board, whether drunk by him or not. The plan was to compel the coal-whippers to visit their houses previous to obtaining employment, and on the night before obtaining a ship to commence the score, and at six o’clock in the morning, before going to work, to drink a pot of beer, or spirits to an equal amount of value; then to take on board for each gang nine pots of beer, to be repeated on delivering every forty-nine tons during the day; after which they were compelled to pay nine or ten shillings per man for each ship for gear. The evil effects of such a system it is unnecessary to point out. After a week’s hard work, a man had nothing to take home. The coal-whippers became a drunken and degraded class, the family were starved, the boys early learned to thieve, and the girls were too often thrown upon the streets. No wonder the men rebelled against this cruel tyranny. For long they bore it, but at length they plucked up courage, and demanded deliverance.

Generation after generation had struggled for their rights, and numerous Acts were passed to redress their grievances; but no sooner was an Act passed than ways and means were found to evade it. Then four brave men, Robert Newell, Henry Barthorpe, George Applegate, and Daniel Brown, created amongst their oppressed fellow-labourers an excitement which never subsided till the Corporation of London took their case in hand. Lieutenant Arnold, with a view to benefit them, established an office, but the publicans combined against him and drove him out of the field. The London Corporation appointed a committee to examine into the whole matter. Government was besieged, but Mr. Labouchere told the coal-whippers that they could not interfere, “as it would be too great an interference with the rights of labour.” The coal-whippers, however, were not to be daunted, and after years of unremitting toil, in which their claims had become increasingly appreciated, Mr. Gladstone prevailed upon the House of Commons to pass the Act which on the 22nd of August, 1843, received the royal assent. The Act simply provided that an office should be established where the coal-whippers should assemble, and that owners and captains of vessels discharging their cargoes by hired men and by the process of whipping should make to them the first offer to discharge their cargoes. It in no way interfered with or attempted to fix the price of the labour. This was left as a matter of contract between employers and employed. As there were conflicting interests to be consulted, the bill provided that the proposed office should be placed under the management of nine commissioners, four of whom should be appointed by the Board of Trade, and four by the Corporation of the City of London, the chairman to be the chairman for the time being of the Shipowners’ Society of London. To show how the Act has worked, we make the following extract from an appeal to the House of Commons by the Committee of the Registered Coal-whippers in the Port of London, published in May of the present year, and which bears the names of John Farrow, John Doyle, William Brown, Michael Barry, John Cronin. They say: – “The object contemplated by the Legislature in the establishment of the office was to secure to the men the full amount of their earnings immediately after their labour was completed, with the exception of one farthing in the shilling, which is required to be left in the office to defray necessary expenses. At first the office was fiercely opposed by interested parties, because it broke up a system of vile, degrading, and unjust extortion, by which these men derived their profits; but this opposition soon subsided, the price of labour became equalised by an understanding between the employers and the employed, the former being at liberty to offer any price they were willing to give, and the latter to accept or refuse as they thought proper; and the only compulsory clause in the Act, in favour of the coal-whippers, is that, an office being established at which they assemble for the purpose of being hired, the shipowners shall first make an offer to the coal-whippers registered at the office, and if refused by them at the price offered, a discharge is given, empowering the captains to obtain any other labourers elsewhere, at not a greater price than that offered to the registered men. The good effects resulting from the establishment of the office are – relief to the men from extortion and a demoralising system, ruinous alike to both body and soul – a fair turn of work in rotation – immediate payment of their wages in money – and an opportunity of disposing of their labour (if any is to be had elsewhere) in the interim of their clearing one ship and obtaining another. The advantage to the trade has been the regularity and certainty with which they obtain their coals from on board ship, instead of the injurious delay which occurred before the office was established, while the men (goaded by oppression) and the captains were contending about the price of the labour; and the advantage to the shipowner has been – the prevention of delay in the delivery of his cargoes – by always finding a sufficient number of men in attendance at the office, for the delivery of the ships – steadiness in the price of labour, and avoidance of detention through ‘strikes’ for higher wages, and on the whole, a lower price for labour than prevailed before the office was established. In some years, nearly £100,000 has passed through the office for wages earned, but of late that amount has been greatly reduced in consequence of the introduction of machinery in docks and other places; the decrease in importation coastwise; the employment of ‘bonâ fide’ servants by some gas companies, and by a few coal merchants; and by frequent evasions of the Act through the interference of persons who have nothing whatever to do with the payment of wages, and who derive pecuniary advantage to themselves by so doing. The retention of the word ‘purchaser’ in the Act gives them power to do this.”

In August, 1856, the Act which did so much good expired. Parliament refused to continue it on the express promise of parties connected with the coal trade, that a model office should be created, which should be conducted in such a manner that the publicans should not be able to renew the hideous evil of the old system. This contract with Parliament has been broken, and at this moment the coal-whippers are suffering from a return to the fearful slavery and tyranny of old times. Already one-third of the trade is again in the hands of the publicans. The first thing the model office did was immediately to throw 252 coal-whippers out of employment. Of course these men were necessitated to go to the publicans. Another complaint against the model office is, that in two cases the men were paid 2d. a ton, and in another case 3d. a ton, less than the price paid to the office. Another grievance is, instead of the persons connected with the coal trade going to the model office, the bonâ fide offices created by the Act, and by means of which it was abused, still exist, and we were informed one of the largest merchants has still his office with a gang of eighty-one men. Of course the publicans are delighted. They have the whole trade in their own hands again; but this must not be. The righteous feeling of the country must be interposed between the publican and his victims – a body of hard-working men are not to be forced into drunkenness and poverty and crime merely that a few publicans may increase their ill-gotten gains. Reason, morality, religion, all protest against such a damnable doctrine. Almost immediately after the Act had ceased, the Rev. Mr. Sangar, the rector of Shadwell, presided over a meeting of coal-whippers “because the coal-whipped office was established in his parish, and because the Coal-whippers’ Act had put down drunkenness, prevented the exactions of middlemen, induced morality, and benefited a large number of industrious men.” Meetings for a similar purpose are held almost every month. On similar grounds we have taken up the case of the coal-whippers – and for the same reasons we ask the aid of the charitable, and religious, and humane. Especially do we ask the temperance societies of the metropolis to interfere in this matter. Many of the coal-whippers are total abstainers. Now that Mr. Gladstone’s Act is obsolete, they have some of them been forced back into the public-house. We must save them ere they be lost for ever. The coal-whippers are in earnest in this matter. They want very little. Simply a renewal of Mr. Gladstone’s Act, with the proviso that there shall be only one office. It was the absence of that proviso that enabled interested parties to evade the provisions of the Act to a certain extent. Surely this is no great boon for Parliament to grant.

THE STOCK EXCHANGE

This country, said the late Mr. Rothschild, is, in general, the bank of the whole world. That distinguished capitalist never said a truer thing. If Russia wants a railway, or Turkey an army, if Ohio would borrow cash, or Timbuctoo build a railway, they all come to London. The English stockholder is the richest and softest animal under the sun – as repudiated foreign stocks and exploded joint-stock projects at home have too frequently illustrated. When the unfortunate stockholder has in this way invested his all, the result is at times very painful. The cause of this is not always to be traced to “greenness,” but to the desire to derive large dividends or interest, without due regard to the security of the investment. Not even is the bonâ fide investor always safe. He is the goose that lays the golden egg. In one respect this weakness is somewhat tragic. For instance, to give an extreme case: – Suppose A. B., twelve years back, had, as the result of a life of industry, saved £5,000, and invested it in the London and North Western Railway, when that famous stock was in demand, and quoted as high as £250, what must be the unhappy condition of that too-confiding A. B., supposing he has not already died of a broken heart, when he finds London and North Western stock quoted, as at this present time, under £100? Again, supposing C. D. had died, leaving his disconsolate widow and twelve children, innocent but helpless, a nice little property consisting of shares in the Western Bank of Scotland. What must be the state of that disconsolate widow and those twelve children, innocent but helpless, upon finding that not only have all the original shares completely vanished into ducks and drakes, but that upon each share a responsibility of somewhere about one hundred and fifty pounds has been incurred besides? Can we calculate the sum total of bitter misery thus created and scattered far and wide? As well might we attempt to realise the dark and dismal regions of the damned. The caution cannot be too often repeated, to avoid investments which entail unknown liabilities, or which are subject to great fluctuations of price or the amount of dividend. Abundant opportunity for safe investment is offered in the Debentures, Preference and Guaranteed Stocks of British Railways, which pay from 4 to 5 per cent. per annum. The aggregate value of the stocks and shares which are dealt in on the London Stock Exchange is somewhat bewildering in its enormous amount. First and foremost are the several stocks constituting the National Debt of Great Britain, which may be taken at between eight and nine hundred millions. The capitals of the various British railways amount to upwards of three hundred millions. The capitals of the Bank of England and of sundry joint-stock banks amount to more than thirty millions. Then there is a large amount invested in canals, gas and water, steam, telegraph, and dock companies. The total amount of American railways is about one hundred and sixty-eight millions sterling; European railways, two hundred millions; and those of India and our colonies, fifty millions. Moreover, there is a vast aggregate amount of foreign stocks and loans, which our readers will not care that we particularise.

The grand mart for the traffic in such things is a large building situate in Capel-court, just opposite the Bank of England. It has three other entrances – one in Shorter’s-court, Throgmorton-street, one in New-court, ditto, and one in Hercules-passage, Broad-street. You cannot get in, for a porter guards each door, and if you elude him you are easily detected by the habitués, and obliged to beat a precipitate retreat. But from the entrance in Hercules-passage, by peeping through the glass folding doors, you may manage to get an imperfect view of the interior. You will see that in the middle of the day there are a great number of well-dressed, sharp-looking gentlemen talking very energetically, and apparently doing a great deal of business. As they pass in and out you hear them discourse as familiarly of thousands as

“Maids of fourteen do of puppy dogs.”

Let me add that there are a variety of distinct markets – the English for stocks and exchequer bills, the foreign for stocks, and the railway and mining, and miscellaneous share department. I may also add that a news-room is attached, where the daily papers, especially the city articles, are very eagerly perused. I am told that the Daily News is the favourite, and that the demand for that paper is very great. The Stock Exchange does not recognise in its dealings any other parties than its own members. Every bargain, therefore, whether for account of the member effecting it, or for account of a principal, must be fulfilled according to the regulations and usages of the house. Its affairs are conducted by a committee of thirty, annually elected. “Every member of the Stock Exchange and every clerk to a member shall attend the committee for general purposes when required, and shall give the committee such information as may be in his possession relative to any matter then under investigation.” The committee have the right to expel any member guilty of dishonourable or disgraceful conduct, or who may violate any of the regulations, or fail to comply with any of the committee’s decisions.

As regards small people outside like ourselves, the functions of the Stock Exchange are soon fulfilled. I have worked hard – I have saved a few hundreds – I want to invest them – I call upon a stock-broker – they are (I mean nothing offensive by the comparison) as thick as thieves in this neighbourhood. I commission him to buy me a certain number of shares in such and such a company. My broker rushes into the Exchange, goes to the particular spot where the dealer in such shares is to be met with, and buys them for me, to be delivered on such a day. I pay him a commission for brokerage, and my business is done. Suppose I want to buy government stock. What is stock? says one, unhappily, in consequence of his own laziness and ill-luck, or of the laziness and ill-luck of his fathers before him, not a holder of such. Stock, O benighted individual, is a term applied to the various funds which constitute the National Debt, the interest on which is paid half-yearly. Few persons buy or sell stock except through a broker, and this is the original business of the stockbroker, and it was for this the Stock Exchange was erected in 1803. It is only since the peace that the present immense traffic has sprung up in miscellaneous and railway shares. Let me suppose I have a thousand pounds to invest in the Three per Cents., which are now quoted at about 96. I wait on a stockbroker; he goes over to the Exchange and purchases them for me, and then sees to their transfer in the Bank of England, receiving as his commission one eighth per cent., or 2s. 6d. in the £100 upon the amount of stock transferred. But I am of a speculative turn, and wish to make a fortune rapidly by means of the Stock Exchange. I again have recourse to a broker. As I assume that I am a mere gambler – a man of straw – I stand to lose or gain a large sum of money on a certain contingency. I draw a blank, and leave my broker in the lurch, who has to settle his accounts as best he can. If he cannot pay by half-past two on the day of settlement, which in shares is once a fortnight, and in consols monthly, he despatches a short communication to the committee of the Stock Exchange; an official then suddenly gives three loud knocks with a mallet, and announces the unpleasant fact that my broker is unable to meet his engagements. He is termed a lame duck, and cannot again figure on the Exchange till he pays a composition of 6s. 8d. in the pound. The readmission of defaulters is in three classes. The first class to be for cases of failure arising from the defection of principals, or from other unfortunate vicissitudes, where no bad faith or breach of the regulations of the house has been practised; where the operations have been in reasonable proportion to the defaulter’s means or resources; and where his general character has been irreproachable. The second class, for cases marked by indiscretion, and by the absence of reasonable caution only, or by conduct reprehensible in other respects. The third class for cases where the defaulter is ineligible under either of the former classes, but whom, nevertheless, the committee may not feel warranted in excluding from the Stock Exchange. The final decision of the committee on each defaulter’s application will be notified to the members in the usual way, and remain posted in the Stock Exchange for forty days. Stockbrokers rarely go into the Bankruptcy Court, as the house appoints assignees, and settles the affair in a much easier way. Lame ducks are not always ruined in purse. I knew one who waddled off the Stock Exchange, he having been a speculator on his own account, and thus evaded the payment of rather a heavy sum. I met him at Brighton this summer, living in one of the best houses in Kemp-town.

Stock-brokers are very facetious fellows, and amuse their leisure hours in many ways, such as tossing for halfcrowns in a hat, and practical jokes; occasionally a good deal of small wit passes current. I have heard of an almanac, circulated in MS., in which the various peculiarities of individual members of the Exchange were very cleverly hit off. A late Exchange wit has given birth to the following jeu d’esprit, which has attained a wide-spread popularity in the City: —

“When the market takes a rise,
Then the public comes and buys;
But when they want to realise,
Oh! it’s ‘Oop de doodum doo!’”

When the government broker appears to operate on behalf of the Commissioners, for the Reduction of the National Debt he mounts into a “box,” and is surrounded by a clamorous host, all eager to buy or sell.

The present number of members of the Stock Exchange approaches nearly 800, each paying a subscription of £10 per annum, besides finding securities for between £800 and £900 for three years. Our stockbroker generally spends his money freely. If he is a married man he has a nice villa at Norwood or Clapham, and affects a stylish appearance. Then there are the “jobbers,” who remain inside the stock market, waiting for the broker, and who are prepared, immediately he appears, to make a price at which they are either buyers or sellers – the jobber calculating upon making it right with the broker, who has undertaken an operation the reverse of his own. Occasionally the jobber runs considerable risk, since, after concluding a bargain, and while endeavouring to obtain a profit on it, the market may turn. Still he is a useful middle-man, and saves the broker a world of trouble.

But there is much business transacted which is less legitimate, and is known as time bargains, which are bargains to deliver stock on certain days at a certain price, the seller, of course, hoping that the price will fall, and the buyer, that it will rise when the period for completing the bargain has arrived. The speculative settlement is effected without making full payment for stock; the losing party simply pays the difference. One who speculates for a rise is a Bull (it is said the great Rothschild made a vast deal of money in this way), the speculator for a fall is a Bear. Continuation is the interest on money lent on the security of stock. A great deal of business is done in this way. A merchant, or a railway company, or a bank, have large sums of money to dispose of. Instead of locking it up they employ a broker, who lends it on certain securities, for a few days or a few weeks. Operations on the Stock Exchange answer in this way, but the small tradesman, or clerk, or professional man who ventures within the charmed circle of Capel-court for the purpose of speculation, generally learns bitterly to rue the day.

THE LONDON HOSPITAL

I am walking along the streets, and in doing so pass a scaffolding where some new buildings are being erected. Suddenly I hear a shriek, and see a small crowd collected. A beery Milesian, ascending a ladder with a hod of mortar, slips and falls on the pavement below. He is a stranger in London, has no friends, no money, scarcely any acquaintance. “What’s his name?” we ask. “He ain’t got no name,” says one of his mates; “we calls him Carroty Bill.” What’s to be done? Why, take him to the hospital. The police fetch a stretcher. “Carroty Bill” is raised on it, and a small procession is formed. It swells as it goes along. The idle street population joins. We form one. A medical student is in the rear; he meets a chum, and exclaims exultingly, “They are taking him to our hospital.” The chum turns back, and the door is reached; admittance is easy. Happily, the place is not a Government establishment, and patients are received whilst there is hope. Poor “Carroty Bill,” bruised and bleeding, yet stupid with drink, is examined carefully by the attendant surgeons. It is of no use asking him what’s the matter; his expressions, never very direct or refined, are now very muddy, and not a little coarse. A careful diagnosis reveals the extent of the injuries received. All that science can do for him is done. If he is taken as an inmate he will have as good nursing and food, and as skilful care and as unremitting attention, as if he were a prince of royal blood. Wonderful places are these hospitals. If Sawney, subject to an unpleasant sensation on the epidermis, blesses the memory of the good duke who erected on his broad domain convenient posts, let us bless a thousandfold the memory of Rahere, who obtained from Henry I. a piece of waste ground, upon which he built a hospital (now known as St. Bartholomew’s) for a master, brethren, and sisters, sick persons, and pregnant women; or of Thomas Guy, son of a lighterman in Horsleydown; but himself a bookseller in Lombard-street after the Great Fire; or of the nameless Prior of Bermondsey, who founded, adjoining the wall of his monastery, a house of alms, now known as St. Thomas’s Hospital. Likewise let us thankfully record the gifts of the rich, of whose liberality such hospitals as those of King’s, and University, and Westminster, and the London, and St. George’s, are the magnificent results.

Now let us return to our friend Carroty Bill. As we have intimated, he is in the ward appropriated to such cases. One of the professors is now going his round, accompanied by his students. Let us go in. The first thing that strikes us is the size, and cleanliness, and convenience of the wards; how comfortable they are, how light, how cheerful, how lofty, and well ventilated! Each patient is stretched on a clean bed, and at the top are pinned the particulars of his case, and on a chair by his side are the few little necessaries he requires. The practised physician soon detects the disease and the remedies. His pupils are examined; the patient forms the subject of a hasty lecture. One is asked what he would do, another what disease such and such a symptom denotes; a word is whispered to the nurse; the sick man, whose wistful eye hangs on every movement, is bid to keep up his spirits, and he feels all the more confident and the better fitted to struggle back to health for the few short words of the professor, to whom rich men pay enormous fees, and whose fame perhaps extends over the habitable globe. And so we pass on from bed to bed. Occasionally the professor extracts a moral. This man is dying of gin. “How much did you take a day?” – “Only a quartern.” – “And for how many years?” – “Seven.” The professor shakes his head – the students know that the man is past cure, that death is only a question of time. A similar process is gone through on the women’s ride, and anxiously do sad eyes follow the little group as the professor and students pass on, in their best way mitigating human agony, and bidding the downcast hope. What tales might be told! Here lies down the prodigal to die; here the village maid hides her shame beneath the dark wings of death. Under these hospital walls – reared and maintained by Christian charity, what men once proud, and rich, and great – what women once tenderly nursed and slavishly obeyed – what beauties once fondly caressed, old, withered, wan, without money and without friends, alone in the bleak, bitter world – linger and pass away for ever.

Let us go down stairs, along that long passage through which eager students are hurrying. The door opens, and we find ourselves in a theatre, as full as it can possibly be of the future surgeons of England, now very rough and noisy. At the bottom, far beneath us, is a small space with a long narrow table, covered with oilskin; behind the table is a door. That door opens, and one or two of the élite of the students known as dressers enter. A matronly female, dressed in the hospital garb, follows; some stout porters bring in a poor creature gently, and place him on the table, and a few professors and professional assistants fill up the group; the noisy students are still and eager. The professor advances to the table, in a few words explains the nature of the malady, and the patient, more dead than alive, endeavours to nerve himself for his impending fate. It is our old friend; his leg is smashed and requires amputation. An assistant administers chloroform, while the operator looks on, watch in hand. In a few seconds it is clear the patient is insensible, and the knife is handed to the operator, who, with his arm bare, and his sleeves tucked up, commences his painful task. Up squirts the red blood, and many a pale face and averted eye around testify how painful the exhibition is to those who are not accustomed to it. Happily, the medical men near have the calm composure and readiness of resource true science suggests. The first incision made, and the skin peeled around, an assistant hands a saw, and in the twinkling of an eye the limb is severed, and the stump, bleeding and smoking, is being sewn up by skilful hands almost before the poor fellow wakes up, wearied and exhausted by loss of blood, from what must have been to him, if we may judge by his moans and exclamations, a terrible dream. As soon as possible he is borne away, the blood is sponged up, the table wiped down; and another patient, it may be a pale-faced girl or a little boy suffering from some fatal malformation, succeeds. All that humanity can suggest is resorted to. Here science loses her stern aspects, and beats with a woman’s tenderness and love; and not in vain, for from that table rise, who otherwise would have painfully perished, many to bless their families, it may be the world. But all is over, and we follow the crowd out, avoiding that other passage leading to the dissecting-room, where on many a table lie the mangled forms of what were once men and women, in all stages of dissection and decay, with students hard at work on them, painfully gathering or seeking to gather a clue to the mystery of mysteries we call life. Possibly by the fire-place some half-dozen young fellows will be smoking and drinking beer. But why note the contrast? Out of the dissecting-room, beyond the narrow precincts of the hospital, masked in gay clothes, with faces all red with paint and wrinkled with idiotic leer, stand side by side the living and the dead.

The principal London Hospitals are the following: – 1. St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in West Smithfield, first founded in the twelfth century, and refounded by Henry VIII. in 1546. The building, a spacious quadrangular structure, is principally modern, having been finished in 1770. It makes up 580 beds. In 1848,71,573 were relieved by this hospital, viz., 5,826 inpatients, 19,149 out-patients, and 46,598 casual ditto. Necessity is the only recommendation to this institution; and patients are received without limitation. The medical staff is equal to any in the metropolis. The staircase was gratuitously painted by Hogarth. 2. Guy’s Hospital, St. Thomas’s Street, Southwark, founded in 1721, contains accommodation for 580 in-patients, and has an excellent museum and theatre of anatomy. This magnificent hospital, which consists of two quadrangles and two wings, was founded and endowed by Thomas Guy, a bookseller, who expended £18,793 upon the building, and left £219,419 for its endowment – the largest sum, perhaps, that has ever been expended by any individual on similar purposes. Recently, however, Guy’s Hospital has met with another benefactor, but little inferior, in point of liberality, to its founder; a citizen, of the name of Thomas Hunt, having bequeathed to it, in 1829, the princely sum of £200,000! The medical school attached to this hospital, while under the superintendence of the late Sir Astley Cooper, was one of the most extensive, and probably, also, the best in the empire. 3. St. Thomas’s Hospital, in High Street, Borough, was formed out of two other charities by Edward VI., and rebuilt in 1693. Additions were made in 1732, and a large part was rebuilt in 1836. It contains 18 wards, and 428 beds. It has an income of about £25,000 a year, derived almost wholly from rents of estates in London and the country. 4. St. George’s Hospital, near Hyde Park Corner, lately rebuilt, has a fine front, 200 feet in length, facing the Green Park. It accommodates 460 in-patients. 5. The Middlesex Hospital, near Oxford Street, founded in 1745, has 285 beds, and relieves numerous out-patients. 6. London Hospital, in Whitechapel, was founded in 1740. Its wards accommodate about 250 patients. 7. Westminster Hospital, rebuilt in 1833, near the Abbey, has 174 beds; but three wards, containing space for fifty additional beds, are unfurnished, notwithstanding there is a great demand for hospital accommodation. 8. The Marylebone and Paddington Hospital, opened in 1850, has 150 beds, which it is proposed to increase to 376, supposing the necessary funds to be forthcoming. This, and the four last mentioned hospitals, depend wholly, or almost wholly, on voluntary subscriptions, which are said to be very insufficient to meet the demands upon them. The University College and King’s College Hospitals, and Charing Cross Hospital, are smaller establishments of the same nature, each accommodating about 120 patients, and there are other establishments of the same description. Medical schools are connected with the above hospitals, in which lectures are delivered by the officers, and which are attended by several hundreds of students. Within the last few years the number of medical students has considerably decreased.

PORTLAND PLACE

The worst effects of drunkenness are, perhaps, after all, its indirect ones. It is a sad sight to see man stricken down in his prime, and woman in her beauty; to see individuals’ hopes and prospects blighted; to see in that carcase staggering by the utter wreck and ruin of an immortal soul. But this is but a small portion of the damage done to humanity by the ravages of intemperance. Look at our great social evil. I need not name it. No one who walks the streets of London by night requires to be informed what that is. Has drink nothing to do with it? Ask that unfortunate, who has just commenced her evening’s walk. She will tell you that when she parted with her innocence she had previously been drugged with drink; that if it were not for drink she could not pursue her unhallowed career; that her victims are stimulated by drink; and that without the gin-palace or the public-house she and such as she could not exist. I do not now speak of the worst forms of prostitution, of the gin-palaces in the East frequented by drunken sailors, where women are kept as a source of attraction and revenue; but of the better classes, of the dashing women who are supplied with expensive dresses by respectable Oxford-street tradesmen in the expectation of being paid by some rich victim; the women whom you meet dressed so gay in Regent-street or Portland-place.

Once upon a time there was a rascally old nobleman who lived in a big house in Piccadilly. Mr. Raikes describes him as “a little sharp-looking man, very irritable, and swore like 10,000 troopers, enormously rich, and very selfish.” He sat all day long at a low window, leering at beauty as it passed by, and under his window was a groom waiting on horseback to carry his messages to any one whom he remarked in the street. If one did not know that we lived in a highly moral age, one would fancy many such old noblemen lived in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, for in the streets leading thence, and reaching as far back as Tottenham-court-road, we have an immense female population, all existing and centred there, who live by vicious means – all with the common feeling of their sex rooted out and destroyed; all intended by nature to diffuse happiness around; all a curse on all with whom they have to do. In this small circle, there is enough vicious leaven to leaven all London. It is impossible to get a true estimate of their number. Guesses of all kinds have been made, but none are exactly to be depended on. In a great capital like ours, where wealthy sensualists can and do pay enormous sums for the gratification of their whims – (I have seen it stated that on one occasion a gentleman went into a house in Norton-street with a £500 bank-note, and after staying a few hours received but £20 change) – it is not alone the professedly vicious – the class whom we call prostitutes – who prostitute themselves. As fine shops are pointed out in fashionable streets, which are said to be houses of the most infamous description, in spite of the display of lace and millinery in the window, so there are thousands of women, supposed to be respectable, and to live in a respectable manner, who yet are to all intents and purposes prostitutes, though they would not be classified as such. Now the number of this latter class is much exaggerated. Towards the close of the last century, when the population of London amounted to about a million, Dr. Colquhoun, magistrate of the Thames Police, asserted the number of prostitutes to be at least 50,000. If prostitution has followed the same ratio of increase as the population, the number now must be considered as truly appalling. But evidently the Doctor’s estimate is exaggerated. At a period much nearer to our own, Mr. Chadwick puts down the number, excluding the City, at 7,000; Mr. Mayne, at from 8,000 to 10,000. The City Police estimates the number at 8,000, and this estimate is supported by Dr. Ryan, and Mr. Talbot, secretary to the Association formed in London for the protection of young girls. This is a very high figure; but a recent French writer tells us that in London, in the higher ranks of life, the proportion of vicious women to virtuous are as one to three! and in the lower ranks virtue does not exist at all!!! At any rate, there is reason to believe that in London there are 5,000 infamous houses. If besides we reckon up the procuresses, the keepers of low gin-palaces and beer-shops, where women are the bait, we are lost and bewildered, and dare not trust ourselves to give in numbers any idea of the persons directly and indirectly connected with prostitution, or of the sum spent annually in London on that vice alone. And all this is carried on in the most methodical way. There are men and women whose constant employment is to search all parts of the metropolis for fresh victims; and to them young girls from the country and servant maids-of-all-work are easy prey. Then letters are written and sent to the clubs and to the patrons of such infamy, and they are furnished with all the particulars, and the price of the victim’s willing or unwilling seduction and shame. This state of things is progressive. Last year the returns of the City missionaries show an increase in their districts of fallen women to the number of 1,035. Of course it is only with the dregs that the City missionary comes in contact. While a woman preserves her health, and youth, and good looks, she lives in better quarters than those into which the City missionary generally finds his way. For a time she is gay; she dresses fine, spends money freely, drinks, and sings, and then prematurely becomes old, and sad, and poor.

Is this ever to be so? Is woman always to sell herself to man? And is man to dream that the smile thus bought is no lie, but a precious truth? I don’t suppose that if men were temperate universal chastity would be the result; but that we should have less immorality is, I think, an admitted fact. Why are women, prostitutes? Chiefly, we are told, because of poverty; and of all causes of poverty, is not intemperance the greatest? Would you see how one vice is connected with another? Come up Portland-place at night. True, there are no public-houses here, but they are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood; and in them all night the men and painted women from Portland-place madden themselves with drink. Yes, here are the women that should have been British wives and mothers utterly perverted, and dragging down with them many a heart that might have emerged into a noble life. Lust and intemperance have slain them. “Lost, lost, lost for ever!” is the cry that greets us as we look at them.

An association has been formed in this neighbourhood to wipe away this plague spot. In their report, the committee state, when the movement commenced, which issued in the establishment of the association at the close of 1857, the condition of the districts (All Souls and Trinity), comprising the streets lying immediately to the eastward of Portland-place, was perfectly appalling. It was then calculated that in those streets there were not less than 140 notorious houses of ill-fame, containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of prostitution was swelled by a large number of young women, lodging in the districts, who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by working for shops, but principally by the means of night prostitution. One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses, utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the passenger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was as pure and as much resorted to as any of the most favoured districts of western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers, gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the principal part, were females grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter destitution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover, ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were sold over from time to time to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.

At the meeting held to receive this report, the Rev. Mr. Garnier stated that “he visited himself a house in Norton-street, where in one room he saw a seat placed around so as to hold as many of the poor creatures as possible on a day that was appointed for brothel keepers, to attend and bid for their purchase (hear, and much sensation). The unfortunate girls thus disposed of were brought from abroad, and while connected with the House of Commons he had the best evidence of this, for noblemen and members of parliament showed letters they continually received soliciting them to partake of the depravity (much sensation). The letters spoke of a beautiful girl just imported from Belgium or France, and the nobleman or gentleman, whichever he might be, was asked to visit her, as she was at his service. In one case a letter was received from the rectory district of that parish (Marylebone), in which it was stated that a girl at a certain address was ready to be given up to lust to the highest bidder. These letters were addressed to the Speaker as well as the members of the House of Commons, and this, together with the spectacle he (the Rev. gentleman) witnessed in Norton-street, was, he considered, very good evidence of the abominable traffic that was carried on in this country.

“The Rev. Mr. Marks said, within the last fifteen months he was called to visit three Jewesses, painful as the duty was, and this visit was made in the Rev. Mr. Garnier’s district. These three girls had been imported for the purposes of prostitution (hear, hear). In one case alone he was enabled to take the poor creature from the abominable vice that threatened her, and sent her home; and he nearly succeeded with another, but with regret – aye, deep regret, he said so – he was prevented. A sum of £200 had been offered to retain the girl, and this sum was offered by the brother of an M.P.”

The discussion of the delicate question, as the Times terms it, has lately received new light in an unexpected quarter. The victims themselves have taken to writing. “Another Unfortunate” describes her parents. They were drunkards – their chief expense was gin – their children were left to grow up without moral training of any kind. The writer says: – “We heard nothing of religion. Sometimes when a neighbour died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the church. If a grand funeral chanced to fall in our way we went to see that, too – the fine black horses and nodding plumes – as we went to see the soldiers when we could for a lark. No parson ever came near us. The place where we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen. ‘The publicans and sinners’ of our circumscribed, but thickly-populated locality had no ‘friend’ among them. Our neighbourhood furnished many subjects to the treadmill, the hulks, and the colonies, and some to the gallows. We lived with the fear of these things, and not with the fear of God before our eyes.” From such a training could we expect otherwise? The writer asks what business has society to persecute such as she: a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; the unfortunate is the fruit, and society is the tree.

It is in vain that we reclaim the women. The only remedy – the only way to put down the social evil – is to reclaim the men.

MARK-LANE

On a Monday morning, especially on the Eastern Counties lines, the trains running into town have an unusually large number of passengers. They consist generally of the jolly-looking fellows who, at the time of the cattle show, take the town by storm, and fill every omnibus and cab, and dining room, and place of public amusement, and then as suddenly retire as if they were a Tartar horde, dashing into some rich and luxurious capital, then vanishing with their booty, none know whither. However, penetrate into Mark-lane, you may see them every Monday and Friday, smelling very strong of tobacco smoke – for, although smoking is absurdly and strictly prohibited on railways, it is a known fact that people will smoke nevertheless – and with the air of men who are not troubled about trifles, and have their pockets well lined with cash. These are the merchants and millers and maltsters of Mark-lane. All England waits for their reports; their decisions affect the prices of grain at Chicago on one side, and far in the ports of the Black Sea on the other. Bread is the staff of life, and its traffic affects the weal or woe of empires. Prices low in Mark-lane, and in the garrets of London, in the cellars of Manchester, in the wynds of Edinburgh, there is joy. As we may suppose, the trade in grain is one of the most ancient in the world. There were corn merchants and millers long before Mark-lane was built. Originally the corn merchants of the metropolis assembled at a place called Bark’s Quay, where now the Custom-house stands. Then they moved into Whitechapel, somewhere near Aldgate Church, and then the Corn Exchange in Mark-lane was built. Originally there was but one exchange, that erected in 1749, which is private property, and the money for which was raised in eighty hundred-pound shares; each share at this time being worth £1,300. This, I believe, is the only metropolitan market for corn, grain, and seeds. The market days are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; hours, ten to three. Wheat is paid for in bills at one month, and other corn and grain in bills at two months. The Kentish hoymen, distinguishable by their sailors’ jackets, have stands free of expense, and pay less for metage and dues than others, and the Essex dealers enjoy some privileges; in both cases said to be in consideration of the men of Kent and Essex having continued to supply the city when it was ravaged by the plague. Old Mark-lane consists of an open Doric colonnade, within which the factors have their stands. It resembles the atrium, or place of audience in the Pompeian house, with its impluvium, the place in the centre in which the rain fell. In this market, managed by a committee and secretary, there was no foreign competition. At this time there are about seventy-two stands, and more than a hundred subscribers of five guineas each. I believe the stands are from thirty to forty pounds a year. Now at one time this place was quite a close borough. There were more factors than the place could hold, and when a stand was vacant it was given to some poor broken-down man, who would not be likely to interfere with the jolly business which the rest were carrying on. The excluded were very indignant. They planted themselves in Mark-lane. They did business in the street outside the Exchange. They were men of equal standing and respectability with any of the privileged; and after an immense amount of grumbling and growling, they did as most Englishmen would have done – went to Parliament, and got an Act to have a second Exchange erected side by side with the old one. This second erection was completed in 1826, and in the partition are now a couple of arches, which were placed there in order that, if at any time the old Exchange were amalgamated with the new – a consummation of which there seems no chance at present – the whole may be formed into one capacious market. The new Exchange has a central Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by imperial arms and agricultural emblems, the ends having corresponding pilasters. Here lightermen and granary-keepers have stands as well as corn merchants, factors, and millers. At the further end of this building there is a seed-market; nor is this all. Attached to the new Exchange is an hotel, in the upper room of which is an auction room for the sale of damaged cargoes; and on the other side – that is, above the old Exchange – is a subscription refreshment room, known as Jack’s, where most of the Norfolk flour is sold, a great deal of it being paid for in ready money, and then resold again downstairs, on the usual credit, the profit on such a transaction being the odd threepence or sixpence, which becomes a respectable sum if you buy or sell a thousand quarters. Up here are the millers or their agents in large quantities. “We are not,” said one to the writer, “the rogues the world takes us for. If we don’t sell good flour, the bakers can’t sell their bread.” Let us hope this is true; but in these days of universal rascaldom, when gold, no matter how dishonestly acquired, makes its possessor an object of respect, and not of scorn, what wonder is it that we believe that there are rogues in grain as well as in other trades? In the middle of the old Exchange you will see an immense number of foreigners; these are Greeks, living all together in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, who are gradually getting all the foreign trade – what are our English merchants about? – of the country into their hands. It is the Greeks, not the English, who buy up the corn shipped from the ports of the Black Sea, and pour it into the English market. Besides these Greeks, you will see captains of vessels in great numbers waiting to hear if their cargoes are sold, and where they are to be taken. A busy scene is Mark-lane, especially on a Monday. The malt tax in 1857 was £6,470,010, which represents an enormous amount of malt, of which a great part is sold in Mark-lane. In the year 1857 there were imported into the United Kingdom 3,473,957 quarters of wheat, 1,701,470 of barley, 1,710,299 of oats, 76,048 of rye, 159,899 of peas, 305,775 of beans, 1,150,783 of Indian corn, 188 of buck-wheat, and 2,763 of bere or bigg; and in the same year there were imported 2,184,176 cwts. of flour and meal. Then we must not forget the home produce, which is principally brought into London by ships, though a great deal of it comes up by rail. In London alone the consumption of wheat in the shape of flour and otherwise may be estimated at upwards of 1,600,000 quarters a year. But Mark-lane is not, like Smithfield, a market for London alone. On the contrary, it is attended by buyers from all parts of the country. The cargoes in the river sold at Mark-lane may be landed at Leith, or Glasgow, or Liverpool, or even in the distant ports of Cork, or Belfast, or Dublin. Well may there be a bustle in Mark-lane. At eleven the market commences, and at the various stands preparations are made for the business of the day by untying and placing on the stands little bags containing samples of every conceivable species of grain eatable by man or beast. At the end of the day the floor is covered with the samples which the buyer, after rubbing over in his hands and inspecting, has thrown down. The sweepings are afterwards gathered up and sold, and realise, I believe, a very handsome sum in the course of the year. At half-past two a beadle rings a bell, and no more are permitted to enter the Exchange. Those that are there hastily finish their business, tie up their samples, swallow a chop, rush off to their respective termini, and in two or three hours are perhaps more than a hundred miles away. Mark-lane for the rest of the week is a dull, dirty lane, with but few passengers, and very dark and dull indeed.

Yet Mark-lane has its romances. Look around you; not a man perhaps but can tell you of enormous profits and enormous losses. The trade carried on here is of so speculative a character that but few realise money by it after all. Come to this stand. It was calculated the other day that the firm carrying on business here were losing at the rate of a thousand pounds per hour. Hear this factor: “I once bought some Windsor beans at an early hour in the morning at 32s. a quarter, and sold them the same day at 64s.” Yet our informant has been compelled to settle with his creditors. You may point to me a man who has not been reduced to this, but he is a rara avis, and he can tell you how, perhaps, another day or another hour would have made him a bankrupt. The rule is a crisis and a crash; not a disgraceful one – for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually – but a crisis and a temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many years, and has accumulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation scatters it all, and compels him – old, and destitute of the energy of youth – to begin business again. This is hard, but it cannot be helped. Men who have been on the Exchange long can tell you funny stories of how they came at seven in the morning and cleared handsome sums of money before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our ancestors had devised – in order that bread, the staff of life, might not be high in price – on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see if the flour is hidden there – an amiable weakness to which the mob was much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts of the old world and the new.

PREACHING AT ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

In that celebrated chapter in which Gibbon explains the rise and progress on natural grounds of the Christian religion, it has always seemed to us that he has not done justice to the immense influence which the institution of the pulpit must originally have possessed. Had he gone no further than the pages of his New Testament, the distinguished historian would have found many an instance of oratorical success. He would have read how Herod quailed before the rude orator who in the desert drew multitudes to hear him as he proclaimed the advent of the Messiah, and warned a generation of vipers to flee from the wrath to come; he would have read how, whilst the Teacher spake as never man spake, the common people heard him gladly; how Felix trembled in his pride and power, and how the polished intellect of Athens listened, and admired, and believed, while Paul preached of an unknown God. It is true that in a subsequent chapter Gibbon does not altogether ignore the pulpit, and admits the sacred orators possessed some advantages over the advocate or the tribune. “The arguments and rhetoric of the latter,” he writes, “were instantly opposed with equal arms by skilful and resolute antagonists, and the cause of truth and reason might derive an accidental support from the conflict of hostile passions. The bishop, or some distinguished presbyter to whom he cautiously delegated the powers of preaching, harangued without the danger of interruption or reply a submissive multitude whose minds had been prepared and subdued by the awful ceremonies of religion. Such was the strict subordination of the Roman Catholic Church, that the same concerted sounds might issue at once from a hundred pulpits of Italy or Egypt, if they were tuned by the master hand of the Roman or Alexandrian bishop.” But much more than this may be said. Wonderful is the power of oratory. Gibbon may have under-rated it, for we know that he never could summon up the requisite courage to make a speech in Parliament; but nevertheless rare power is his, who can speak what will touch the hearts, and form the opinion, and mould the lives of men. The more unlettered be the age, the more triumphant will be this power; and when the theme is the stupendous one of religion – when in it, according to the belief of preacher and hearer, eternal interests are involved – woe that shall never pass away – joy that shall never die – when, moreover, this living appeal is put in the place of dead form or dreary routine, what wonder is it that before it should fade away the pagan faith of Greece or Rome? The pulpit and Christianity are identical. In times of reformation and revival, the pulpit has ever been a power. When spiritual darkness has come down upon the land – when the oracles have been dumb – when the sacred fire on the altar has ceased to burn, the pulpit has been a form, a perquisite, a sham, rather than a message of peace and glad tidings to the weary and heavy laden.

How comes it to pass that in these days the pulpit of the Establishment has failed to be this? Mr. Christmas, a clergyman of the Established Church, in a volume recently published, seeks to answer this question. To use his own language, “the author had long felt that through some cause or other the Church had not secured that hold on the attention of the multitude without which her ministration could be but partially effective.” Why, even in these few lines we see a reason of the failure which Mr. Christmas mourns. Clergymen live in a world of their own, and will not look at facts as worldly men are compelled to do. Now, as a matter of fact, the Church of England is not the church, but merely a section of the church; and yet you cannot go into an episcopalian place of worship but you hear what the church says – what the church holds – what the church commands – when common sense tells every one that the speaker is merely referring to the Establishment in England, and that even if he were appealing to the custom and tradition of that body of believers which, in all countries and ages, constitutes the church, the inquiry is of little consequence after all – the appeal, in reality, being to the Bible, and the Bible alone, which, in the well-worn language of Chillingworth, is the religion of Protestants. Thus is it so much preaching in the Church of England fails to reach and attract the masses. The ministers will deal in fictions – will exclaim, “Hear the church” – will wander away from topics of human interest into questions with which the educated (and still more the uneducated) mind has no sympathy. The middle-class public go to hear – for it is the genteel thing to go to church – but they sit silent, passive, exhausted by the long preliminary service, wearied, and unmoved. What wonder is it that the more independent and manly – the men who do not fear Mrs. Grundy – who are not afraid of conventionalisms, either stop at home, or leave the Establishment for the more living service of dissent? Mr. Christmas observes: – “Few will venture to say that the style of preaching most valued among nonconformists is inferior to that heard from the pulpits of the Establishment.” The reason is not far to seek: dissent has no ancient prestige to plead; dissent has no rich endowment to fall back on; dissent lives on and is strong in spite of the cold shade of aristocracy, or of the sneer of the bigot or the fool; dissent depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, and dull and dim, dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. Dissent reminds us more than the Establishment of the earlier period of Christianity, of the Carpenter’s Son who had not where to lay his head; whose apostles were fishermen, and whose kingdom, to use His own emphatic declaration, “was not of this world.” The public mind is shocked and estranged when it hears the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he did the other day, defending a recent ecclesiastical appointment, on the plea that the fortunate individual was a man of blameless life, of high family, and great wealth. “Mr. A. B.,” says Mr. Christmas, “must be a clergyman, and Mr. A. B. has not the gift of utterance. Well, he will be able to read his sermons, and the rest of his brethren do the like. It is no detriment to a man’s prospects that the church is half empty when he preaches. ‘He is a very learned man – or a very well connected man – or a very good man – or an excellent parish priest: it is a pity he is not more successful in the pulpit; but then, really, preaching is the smallest part of a clergyman’s duty.’” Such is the way in which such a subject is treated within the pale of the Establishment.

But the Sunday Evening Service at St. Paul’s Cathedral is an answer to all this. Let us see! On a cold winter evening, underneath its magnificent dome, are seated some three thousand well-dressed people. On the first occasion of holding evening service, the scene was rather indecorous for Sunday evening. A large number of those who had been unable to obtain admission to the service were lingering about the south door, and as the carriages of the Lord Mayor and other civic dignitaries were leaving with their occupants, the assembled crowd gave vent to their feelings by unmistakable groans of displeasure, as if they considered themselves to have been unfairly excluded. But this is over – the thing has become a fact. The audience has toned down to the level English standard of propriety. The sublime service, in spite of its length and monotony, has been listened to with a patience almost devout; and the choir, “200 trebles and altos, 150 tenors, and 150 basses,” the largest and most complete choir that was ever yet organised, has done its part to heighten the rapture and piety of the night. A clergyman now ascends the pulpit to preach. He is a popular clergyman – the crowd to-night is larger than it has ever yet been – active, learned, industrious, charitable, devout. He is the Rev. Canon Dale, rector of St. Pancras. Yet what is his theme? The Church – the Mother of us all – the divinely appointed means of man’s recovery from the power and the consequence of sin. Is not this a fatal blunder? What man wants is, not the Church, but the message it proclaims – the voice itself, not the messenger – the good tidings of great joy, not the human instruments by which they are revealed to man.