“In the lower classes of society, the persons engaged are, generally speaking, either immediately or ultimately tempted to their ruin; and there is scarcely any condition of life so destitute and so abandoned, that its distresses have not been aggravated by this allurement to gambling.” Notwithstanding the strong nature of this report, the labors of the committee were fruitless. Various attempts at amelioration were made, but the evil was not finally abolished until the year 1826. FOOTNOTES: [4] Mr. J. B. Heath says of the early lotteries, in his valuable volume entitled “Some Account of the Grocers’ Company,”—“There is not one entry in the accounts to show that the prizes were ever paid,” and quotes various documents to prove that they were very difficult to procure. “The science of puffing,” adds this gentleman, “which in our times has attained such perfection, was unknown at that period, and in lieu of placards and advertisements, the more direct mode was adopted of personal solicitation.” CHAPTER IX. _Wholesale Jobbing.—Insurance on Sick Men.—False Intelligence.—Uselessness of Sir John Barnard’s Act.—Origin of the Blackboard.—Opposition to Loans.—Lord Chatham’s Opinion of Jobbers.—Inviolability of English Funds.—Parisian Banking-Houses.—Proposition to pay off the National Debt.—Extravagance of the Contractors.—Lord George Gordon’s Opinion of them.—Members’ Contracts.—New System adopted.—Abraham Goldsmid.—Bankers’ Coalition broken by him.—His Munificence.—His Death.—Sensation in the City._ The following picture of wholesale jobbing, drawn from public and private documents, from correspondence, from newspapers, and from Parliamentary history, will show that gambling was equally pursued in high places as in ’Change Alley. Letters from abroad, containing false intelligence, were forwarded to, or forged by, senators; names of importance were fraudulently used; the news was promulgated, and funds raised or lowered according to the wish of the contriver. But if the jobber was cheated in one way, he took his revenge in another. The domestics of public men were bribed by him; the secretaries of men in office were paid by him; the mistresses of ministers were accessible to him; and, it is said, even their wives were not seldom in the pay of members of the Stock Exchange. Nor did many hesitate to declare that men in office not only made profit of the news they really received, but that they promulgated false intelligence, knowing, from their position, it would be received as true, at the expense of their own character, and to the ruin of the men who trusted them.