The Commissioners reported that they were persuaded that the apprenticeship served by a clerk who eventually became a member on his own account carried with it a promise of future success. At that time such apprenticeship was not compulsory, and the recent alteration in the rules compelling every would-be member to serve the apprenticeship would doubtless have given much satisfaction to the Commissioners. As a matter of fact, the Commission recommended that in the case of the election of new members there should be a substantial inquiry into their character, position, and general fitness, and that the inquiry should be real, not covered by the answers to the formal questions required by the rules. It thought that such inquiry could better be carried out by a small sub-committee, in spite of its objection to the general idea of dividing the Committee into panels. It further recommended that the guarantee of the sureties should be extended from two years to four years. There is now a subcommittee for the election of new members, and the guarantee does now extend over four years. As to the Stock Exchange principle that members should be entitled to look to the members with whom they dealt as if they were principals, quite apart from their engagements with outsiders, the Commission held that this had the merit of enabling the Committee with its absolute power to enforce bargains and adjust disputes with speed and facility. The public were not injured by such a system so long as the legal rights and liabilities of the member in relation to the principal outside were not extinguished or affected. No rule of the Stock Exchange ought to be allowed to qualify or destroy that legal relation. On the question of the abolition of the jobber, which has frequently been mooted, the Commission found that his existence was of extreme value to the public, attributing to the facilities for business which the system provided the fact that orders given on provincial exchanges or foreign bourses were constantly sent to London. But in cases of inactive securities, in which the jobber was unwilling to make a price in the ordinary way, the Commission recommended that a book should be kept in which brokers could enter their requirements, with a view to bringing the brokers of buyers and sellers into immediate contact. As a matter of fact, a board for such a purpose does now hang in the Home Railway Market, but it is very little used. In the matter of the facility with which brokers and jobbers transacted their business, the Commission paid a special tribute to the machinery of the Clearing Department, which, it said, appeared to answer its purpose of settling a whole series of bargains, by bringing the ultimate seller into contact with the ultimate buyer, exceedingly well. Nowadays the Clearing Department is sometimes subjected to criticism, and its machinery has broken down more than once, notably under the exceptional strain of the South African boom in 1895.