In the _Weekly Journal_ of January 2, 1719-20, can be read: ’It was the observation of a witty knight many years ago, that the English people were something like a flight of birds at a barn-door. Shoot among them and kill ever so many, the rest shall return to the same place in a very little time, without any remembrance of the evil that had befallen their fellows.’ The pigeons at Monte Carlo, whom the cruel-minded idiots who fire at them have missed, instead of flying at once and for ever from the murderous spot, perch on the cage in which their fellows are kept, and are easily caught again, to be eventually killed. ’Thus the English,’ the _Weekly Journal_ concludes, ’though they have had examples enough in these latter times of people ruined by engaging in projects, yet they still fall in with the next that appears.’ And thus the Stock Exchange flourishes. That desolation-spreading upastree was planted in the mephitic morass of the national debt. It is considered deserving of blame in an individual to get into debt, yet sometimes his doing so is unavoidable—his means are insufficient for his wants. But a nation has no excuse for taking credit and getting into debt. There is wealth enough in the country to pay cash for all it requires; and if it borrows money merely to subsidize foreign tyrants to enchain their own subjects, it commits a criminal act. But nearly the whole of our national debt has such an origin, and its poisonous produce is the Stock Exchange. The word ’stock-jobber’ was first heard in 1688, when a crowd of companies sprang into existence, and it was then that the Stock Exchange was first established as an independent institution at Jonathan’s Coffee-house, in Change Alley, in or about 1698. Before then the brokers had carried on their business in the Royal Exchange. London at that time abounded—at what time does it not?—with new projects and schemes, many of them delusory, consequently the legitimate transactions of the Royal Exchange were inconveniently interfered with by the presence of so many jobbers and brokers—that pernicious spawn of the public funds, as Noortbouck calls them—and they were ordered to leave the Exchange. They just crossed the road and went to Jonathan’s, ’and though a public nuisance, they serve the purposes of ministers too well, in propagating a spirit of gaming in Government securities, to be exterminated, as a wholesome policy would dictate.’ There, at Jonathan’s, ’you will see a fellow in shabby clothes,’ as we read in the ’Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London,’ ’selling £10,000 or £12,000 in stock, though perhaps he may not be worth at the same time 10s., and with as much zeal as if he were a director, which they call selling a bear-skin.’ Thus this latter expression seems very old. The business of stock-jobbing increased, in spite of some feeble repressive attempts on the part of Government in 1720, the House of Commons passing