and its capital, under one pretext or another, had been increased to £33,500,000 sterling. In the course of the speculative fever, the price of the £100 stock was run up to £1200, when the collapse occurred, and in less than two months it was quoted at £86. Companies were formed, as every one knows, for the wildest and most outlandish schemes, and so reckless was the speculation that when an impostor took an office and promoted a company "to Carry on an Undertaking of Great Advantage, but Nobody to Know What It Is," he actually secured £3000 in deposits of £2 in a single day, with which he promptly decamped.

In 1762 some of the leading dealers formed a kind of club at Jonathan's Coffee-House, and one hundred and fifty of them paid £8 a year each for the exclusive use of the premises, in which to transact such part of their business as did not take place at the Bank, the South Sea House, or the India House. But soon they outgrew this, and in 1773 they moved into a building by the corner of Threadneedle street and Sweeting's Alley, on the site where a statue of the late Mr. Peabody now stands, just behind the Royal Exchange. This site was very convenient, being close to the Bank of England, where dealings in the funds were carried on in the rotunda, and also near the Royal Exchange, where foreign loans were dealt in. The building was open to the public, who might go in as far as a bar, and on payment of a subscription of sixpence at day were entitled to pass the bar and mingle with the dealers. Securities were gradually on the increase, but the great mass of transactions were in the English funds, to which the war with America had added £104,000,000. The year 1787 saw a rather severe crisis, and twenty-five failures occurred. The names of those who had been declared defaulters were painted on a blackboard, a custom that was abolished only some forty years ago. In 1797 occurred the panic consequent upon the war with France and the suspension of specie payments, when three-per-cent. consols touched the lowest price on record, 473%. In 1801 the ownership of the Sweeting's Alley Stock Exchange had passed into a few hands. The volume of business had grown, and with it came a largely in creased number of irresponsible dealers,

whom it was the desire of the more responsible members to exclude. A few of the richer members raised a capital of £20,000, bought the site in Capel Court, and elected members of the new Stock Exchange by ballot at a subscription of ten guineas each. The management of the funds and building of the Stock Exchange was placed under the direction of nine trustees and managers, while it was arranged that a committee of thirty members or subscribers, who were not necessarily proprietors or shareholders, should undertake the regulation of dealings and the conduct of business. This rather curious dual control exists to this day. Many schemes have been proposed to obviate it, but at the last meeting of proprietors it was stated that nothing practical had yet been suggested.

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The Stock Exchange is therefore really a private club, formed for the purpose of dealing in stocks and shares, and it virtually controls all legitimate transactions of that nature, just as the Turf Club controls racing matters, and the Marylebone Cricket Club, or M. C. C.," is the supreme authority in the cricket world. It supplies a striking instance of the genius of the English people for self-government, and also of the anomalies arising from the way things in England grow out of all likeness to their original form, while, owing to the innate conservatism of the English, they remain wholly unchanged in essence. The original capital of the company has grown from the modest sum of £20,000 in 1801 to a subscribed capital of £240,000, with an authorized debenture capital of £750,000, of which £450,000 is issued, and the shares, which are unlimited and on which £12 is considered to have been paid, return a dividend of seventy-five per cent., and command a market price of about £230. These shares can be held only by members of the Stock Exchange, but there is no obligation for members to be shareholders. As a matter of fact, the shares are held at present by 1169 proprietors, while the number of members elected for 1901 was 4754. The annual subscription has been gradually raised from 10 guineas in 1801 to 40 guineas, and the entrance fee for members is 500 guineas.

The public are rigidly excluded from the building, but members are entitled to employ two classes of clerks who may

enter the House-"authorized" and "unauthorized." An authorized clerk means one who is authorized to deal and transact business for the firm he represents, while an unauthorized clerk may enter those parts of the House where bargains are checked and settlements conducted; but his use of the floor of the House is restricted to the delivery of messages to his employers, and he is forbidden to loiter or stand about. The abuse of this privilege has led to the recent introduction of the rule that unauthorized clerks must wear badges, to distinguish them from members and authorized clerks.

In 1801 the mass of the business of the five hundred members was still in the government funds. A survival of this is the curious but not unpopular practice of making the 1st of May and the 1st of November Stock Exchange holidays, these being the days when the books of the Bank of England were shut in order to prepare for the payment of the dividend on consols, which was then paid half-yearly. Dealings in consols, which had formerly taken place entirely in the rotunda of the Bank of England, gradually became less and less in that locality and centered in the Capel Court building. During the erection of the Stock Exchange, a house was hired in Bartholomew Lane for the convenience of members, and when a broker was inquired for at the rotunda and was not there, the inquirer would be told that he was in the House; and this was the origin of this familiar term.

years of the long war with France, business rapidly increased; 120,000,000 was added to the national debt. This was the time when Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the English house of that name, was the most prominent figure on the Stock Exchange. He ar

From 1810 to 1815, the concluding

ranged and underwrote loans, and his transactions were gigantic. He founded the Alliance Insurance Company, with which his descendants have always been prominently connected, and he is the hero of many apocryphal anecdotes, such as that which credits him with having been at Waterloo, and returning to the Stock Exchange the sole possessor of the knowledge of the victory that had been won. He took up his position against his usual pillar, looking deeply depressed; brokers who usually acted for him. were selling, while he was employing other brokers to buy much more largely; and as a result he brought off a very magnificent coup. As a matter of fact, he was not present at the battle, but had received early information from his agent at Ostend.

Then followed a period of great activity in company-promoting. Insurance companies, waterworks and gas companies, followed one another in shoals, resulting in the panic of 1825. Ten years afterward, a boom of worthless foreign stocks of every description was followed by the panic of 1835. And again in 1845 came the railway mania, which eclipsed in the wildness of its inflation everything that had occurred since the South Sea Bubble.

By 1850 business had entirely outgrown