“All distinction of party, religion, sex, character, and circumstance,” writes Smollett, the historian of the time, “were swallowed up in this universal concern. Exchange Alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, Whigs and Tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with multitudes of females. All other professions and employments were utterly neglected; and the people’s attention wholly engrossed by this and other chimerical schemes, which were known by the denomination of bubbles. New companies started up every day, under the countenance of the prime nobility. The Prince of Wales was constituted governor of the Welsh Copper Company; the Duke of Chandos appeared at the head of the York Buildings Company; the Duke of Bridgewater formed a third, for building houses in London and Westminster. About a hundred such schemes were projected and put in execution, to the ruin of many thousands. The sums proposed to be raised by these expedients amounted to three hundred millions sterling, which exceeded the value of all the lands in England. The nation was so intoxicated with the spirit of adventure that people became a prey to the grossest delusion. An obscure projector pretending to have formed a very advantageous scheme, which, however, he did not explain, published proposals for a subscription in which he promised that in one month the particulars of his project should be disclosed. In the meantime he declared that every person paying two guineas should be entitled to a subscription for £100, which would produce that sum yearly. In the forenoon this adventurer received a thousand of these subscriptions; and in the evening set out for another kingdom.” No sooner were there bits of paper to deal in than jobbers or brokers sprang up to handle them, and by natural gregarious processes these dealers gathered in one spot. Thus competition was stimulated and active markets created. The rotunda of the bank and the Royal Exchange were their first haunts, indeed until Archbishop Laud drove them out they were to be found bargaining on the wide floors of St. Paul’s Cathedral. As the business expanded they took to the neighboring streets and coffee houses, and so Change Alley, Jonathan’s Coffee House, Cornhill, Lombard Street and Sweeting’s Alley became their familiar retreats. Old Jonathan’s burned down in 1748 and New Jonathan’s in Threadneedle Street succeeded it. Here, in July, 1773, “the brokers and others at New Jonathan’s came to a resolution that, instead of its being called New Jonathan’s, it should be called ‘The Stock Exchange,’ which is to be wrote over the door.” Thus while business in the public funds was still conducted on a large scale at the bank, and dealings in foreign securities still centred at the Royal Exchange, London may be said to have had a Stock Exchange in the modern sense from that day in 1773 when the name was “wrote over the door” at New Jonathan’s.[103]