rendered such operations on a large scale almost impossible. The electric telegraph has injured the breed of carrier pigeons, and more than half the poetry of fraudulent stock-jobbing has disappeared. The range of the jobbers speedily extended itself beyond the comparatively narrow field presented by the funds. Exchequer bills with a variable premium were invented and brought into the market, a large and lucrative business was done in lottery tickets, and even seats in parliament were negotiated on the Stock Exchange. Joint-stock companies next came into play, and these have ever since proved an inexhaustible mine of wealth to the jobbers. Nor were they in the least particular as to the nature of the commodity in which they dealt. Thomas Guy, founder of the hospital called after his name, acquired his fortune by means similar to those which are now made matter of reproach to the Jews of Portsmouth and Plymouth. It is a curious feature in the history of mankind, that money questionably amassed is more often destined to pious uses than the savings of honest industry. The conscience of the usurer becomes alarmed as the hour of dissolution draws nigh. "His principal dealings were in those tickets with which, from the time of the second Charles, the seamen had been remunerated. After years of great endurance, and of greater labour, the defenders of the land were paid with inconvertible paper; and the seamen, too often improvident, were compelled to part with their wages at any discount, which the conscience of the usurer would offer. Men who had gone the round of the world like Drake, or had fought hand to hand with Tromp, were unable to compete with the keen agent of the usurer, who, decoying them into the low haunts of Rotherhithe, purchased their tickets at the lowest possible price; and skilled seamen, the glory of England's navy, were thus robbed, and ruined, and compelled to transfer their services to foreign states. In these tickets did Thomas Guy deal, and on the savings of these men was the vast superstructure of his fortune reared. But jobbing in them was as frequent in the high places of England as in 'Change Alley. The seaman was poor and uninfluential, and the orders which were refused payment to him were paid to the wealthy jobber, who parted with some of his plunder as a premium to the treasury to disgorge the remainder." But frauds and injustice, even when countenanced by governments, have rarely other than a disastrous issue to the state. So in the case of those seamen's tickets. That the wages due to the sailor should have fallen into arrears during the reigns of Charles and of James, need excite little surprise, when we remember that the revenue in their day never exceeded two millions annually. But that the abuse should have been continued after the revolutionary government had discovered its easy method of raising subsidies--more especially when ample proof had been given of the danger of such