Another practice had obtained a notoriety so bad and baleful, that it became necessary to stop its progress. Directly it was known that any great man was seriously ill, insurances on his life, at rates in proportion to his chance of recovery, were made. These bargains were reported in the papers; and the effect on an invalid who knew his health to be precarious may be imagined, when he saw in the _Whitehall Evening Post_, that “Lord —— might be considered in great danger, as his life could only be insured in the Alley at ninety per cent.” The custom grew so rapidly, and the evil was so serious, that the principal merchants and underwriters refused to transact business with brokers who engaged in such practices. Of a less questionable character was the habit of insuring property in any besieged city; or the yet more common mode of paying a premium to receive a certain sum, should the city be taken by the day named in the contract. The Spanish ambassador was accused of insuring £30,000 on Minorca, during the seven years’ war, when the despatches announcing its capture were in his pocket. The newspapers were the vehicles generally employed to spread false intelligence; and an almost invariable success attended those who made use of the press to promulgate, in bold type and inflated language, “bloody engagement,” “rumored invasion,” or “great victory,” to assist their city operations. Every class, from the maiden who jobbed her lottery-ticket, to the minister who jobbed his intelligence, was involved in the pursuit. All these bargains were for time, and continued to prove that the act by which Sir John Barnard hoped to abolish gambling was useless; and it is an anomaly in the history of our great debt, that bargains in the very funds which were raised to support the national credit are disallowed by the national legislature. It is a law which has been tried and found wanting. It does not prevent, in the smallest or slightest degree, the system it was meant to crush; and it adds to the immorality of the speculator and the risk of the broker, by allowing the former to repudiate his bargain at the expense of the latter. Under the early loan-acts, tallies were delivered to the first contractors. When a sale was effected, the name of the purchaser was indorsed upon the tally, and from that entered into the government books, for the convenience of paying the dividends to the right person. This clumsy machinery was afterwards abolished; but though, in 1717, the transfers and dividends of the national debt were first undertaken by the Bank, it was not until 1783 that the present method of transfer was adopted.