Chapter II: Part 2

There were scores of such public communications. One racing correspondent of a large provincial paper stated that he should never think of going to the course without a revolver in his pocket. Of course the so-called sporting and publicans’ papers tried to make out that these letters were not genuine, or were exaggerated, but without exception they bear on their face evidence of their reality. The writer of these lines, however, ascertained the fact of their genuineness from the editor who published them in one of the largest and oldest of our daily newspapers, which has been by no means otherwise conspicuous in this phase of social reform. We may be allowed to quote the following reflections, which witness to the existence of this ruffianly condition of the Turf, from Mr. George Gissing’s _Private Papers of Henry Rycroft_ (1903), pp. 43-44:—

To-day’s newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a
spring horse-race. The sight of it fills me with loathing.
It brings to my mind that placard I saw at a station in
Surrey a year or two ago, advertising certain races in the
neighbourhood. Here is the poster as I copied it into my
notebook:—

“Engaged by the Executive to ensure order and comfort to the
public attending the meeting: 14 detectives (racing), 15
detectives (Scotland Yard), 7 police inspectors, 9 police
sergeants, 76 police, and a supernumerary contingent of
specially selected men from the Army Reserve and Corps of
Commissionaires. The above force will be employed solely for
the purpose of maintaining order and excluding bad characters,
etc. They will have the assistance also of a strong force of
the Surrey Constabulary.”

I remember once when I let fall a remark on the subject of
horse-racing among friends chatting together, I was voted
“morose.” Is it really morose to object to public gatherings
which their own promoters declare to be dangerous for all
decent folk? Every one knows that horse-racing is carried on
mainly for the delight and profit of fools, ruffians, and
thieves. That intelligent men allow themselves to take part in
the affair, and defend their conduct by declaring that their
presence “maintains the character of a sport essentially
noble,” merely shows that intelligence can easily enough divest
itself of sense and decency.

For a good insight from a bookmaker’s point of view of the “sport of kings” the reader is referred to _Sixty Years on the Turf_, by George Hodgman.

Bad as all this is, the continued permission of existence to these scores of peripatetic gambling hells would be an isolated evil were it not inextricably mixed up indirectly with the daily life of the masses of the population, who very seldom or never visit the courses. But these baneful institutions and the gambling clubs are fed by the life-blood of the people, whose hard-earned money flows by the thousand retail conduits of street and factory bookmakers to these gambling marts and clearing houses. It is not only where working men and women gather in numbers, but in the home, amongst domestic servants of both sexes, in the shop, the office, on the journey, in educational establishments, even in the Sunday school and the juvenile social club and class, that betting is discovered. A lady who devotes her life to the young, and lives among them in a poor part of London, says that she has very little difficulty about drink amongst the youths, but hardly dare attack the betting systematically for fear of losing her protégés. She found one lad actually receiving telegrams from France during the Continental racing season.

An alarming development, for those who travel by rail (and who does not?), is disclosed in several cases of signalmen having been found gambling and carrying on bookmakers’ businesses. Any one who, like the writer, has been in a railway collision, will vividly appreciate this. The crunch of the carriages, the awful succeeding moment between life and death, are among the ills that mortality is heir to in modern times, and are borne with more or less philosophy, to some extent perhaps depending upon the preventibility of the cause. But it will be well for railway directors, many of whom provide special facilities for the race-course gamesters all through the summer, to the inconvenience of the ordinary traffic, and wink at the gambling which goes on in their carriages however illegal, to draw the line at signal-boxes being made places under the Act and their signalmen being bookmakers. The conviction recently of a signalman for bookmaking at Knaresborough is by no means a solitary instance. In reporting to the Board of Trade on the North British Railway collision at Lochmill siding, Major Pringle states that just before it occurred there were five persons in the signal-box playing games. There are reasons to fear that there are bookmakers’ agents in many of the large railway stations, carrying on their regular nefarious business with the staffs, and affecting the comfort and safety of the public. As to the race-course ruffians, whose patronage is so carefully nursed, they have been known to descend from race trains and relieve refreshment rooms of the provisions without payment, so that it is now the practice in some places to clear them of their contents before the advent of these traffic-cherished caravans.

There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that such cases as that of the clerk through whom the bookmakers robbed the Liverpool Bank of £170,000 (1901), or of the man who began life as a ready-money bookmaker, married into a titled family, was presented at Court, made a member of fashionable clubs, owned the best race-horse of the year, and ended his society career in his cross-examination in the High Court (1904), are exceptional beyond the fact of their striking notoriety. All sections of society are more or less corrupted by the gambling habits prevalent, and particularly by the professional betting system. It would be interesting to trace how many of the unhappy people figuring in the Divorce Court have been connected with the Turf.

In the Civil Service the evil has spread most seriously in the Post Office and Police departments, but is not confined to them. Information having been sent to the writer of this paper that a clerk in a Government office was using the public stationery and other conveniences to issue betting lists from that office, personal application was made to the principal of the establishment, who investigated the matter, found the allegation to be correct, and promptly put a stop to the proceeding. Upon another occasion it was discovered that two clerks were hired to spend their two-day holiday from Civil Service work by the betting men financially interested in a race meeting, who employed them in taking the entrance money to the rings. Having lost a good deal by dishonest janitors, these shrewd speculators had secured the services of individuals who dared run no risk.

The published opinions of such men as Field-Marshal Sir George White, General Wavell, Lord Charles Beresford, Admiral Rawson, and others bear eloquent testimony to the fact that the militant Services are suffering from the immunity obtained by professional gamesters, owing to the lax application of our existing laws and the need for others. The soldiers returning from South Africa were systematically induced by gamblers to part with their savings; and is it not probable that some of the regrettable incidents during the South African campaign, which the nation had to deplore, arose in part from the time of our officers in peace, if not in war, having been occupied more with betting and gambling than in the study of their profession? Many items of information, both of a private and public nature, are alarmingly suggestive of such considerations. A single instance of the latter may be found space for. One of the witnesses before the Select Committee of the House of Lords was an officer commanding a battalion of the Scots Guards, and he gave evidence of the fact that he was a sort of chairman of a betting committee, the go-between of the Jockey Club and Tattersall’s, upon which he spent a considerable portion of his time, the principal duty apparently being to settle betting squabbles between members of the betting clubs and the professional betting men. If this is not considered _infra dig._ for the colonel of a crack regiment, what is to be expected of the rank and file? His colleagues upon this important tribunal included, he said, a representative of the Ring and two well-known commission agents, the trade alias for bookmakers. We have no hesitation in saying that the Navy is as badly tainted, not only upon the evidence of officers whom we have mentioned and others, but on information from different sources. It was the painful duty of one in authority some time ago to court-martial a young comrade who had got into the hands of bookmakers, and took £200 to pay his debts from funds which, as orderly officer of the mess, he was able to lay hands upon. He was dismissed the Service and suffered a year’s imprisonment. In 1904 Rear-Admiral Henderson, Superintendent of Devonport Dockyard, discovered that betting was being systematically carried on, and published an order notifying the discharge of a skilled labourer of nineteen years’ service.

Professional betting is not confined to horse-racing. Lists are habitually issued in connection with other sports, particularly football. It is gambling which causes the rush for the football editions of the halfpenny journals, and, notwithstanding the efforts made by some of its principal patrons, leading officials of the football world have been found taking part in the disreputable gambling arrangements of sporting newspapers. There are numerous instances in athletics, such as foot-racing, of the proceedings being reduced to a farce by the bookmakers, who controlled the runners; and more than one serious accident on the cycle track has been caused by the efforts of one or more competitors to obey the roping orders from their masters in the ring without arousing the suspicions of the public spectators.

GAMBLING

CARDS

In miscellaneous gambling, cards, harmless in themselves, are still prominent. The game of Bridge amongst the wealthier classes is responsible for reproducing many of the vicious situations we read of in the chronicles of our forefathers. While Queen Victoria was lying dead, one very prominent female society leader could not be got to abstain from this form of gambling even for a brief space. At the aristocratic mansion over which she presides guests must play. One young man of moderate income suggested that his means were quite unequal to such hazards as the hostess and her friends were accustomed to, but he was given to understand that he could play or leave. He unhappily chose the former alternative, and in a few hours lost half-a-year’s income. There are hundreds of smaller imitators of this woman, whose husband ranks high in the political world. The disgusting position is frequently created of young girls, not discouraged from gambling by their parents, losing money which they have difficulty in paying to men with whom they are not otherwise well acquainted. In speaking to a young lady who moves in society circles, and on inquiring with due diffidence as to her knowledge of gambling among the friends of her family, she said, without the slightest hesitation, “Oh, every one we know gambles.” One of the speakers at the council meeting of a ladies’ association, of which Lady Trevelyan is president, said that a society lady, on a friend observing that £150 a year seemed a small allowance for her daughter, replied that the latter was such a good Bridge player that she easily made £1000 a year.

Amongst the poor, where horse-race betting does not prevail, cards, to which juveniles are largely taking, as well as automatic machine gambling, are often made the vehicle for disposing of their small means.

THE STOCK AND PRODUCE EXCHANGES

A very large proportion of the business done upon the Stock Exchange is nothing else than gambling. No stock passes. It is merely gambling in the rise or fall for differences. Here, as elsewhere, neglect, for which the whole nation is to blame, has allowed matters to get into a groove, and great difficulty will be found in getting out of it. In another chapter suggestions are made, and if the proposed remedy is necessarily a serious one for those whose business is to a great extent founded upon an illegitimate basis, some of them at least feel that the present system is indefensible, and the following pathetic extracts from a letter written by a member of a leading Stock Exchange firm merely express the conscientious misgivings of the best class of men there—misgivings which are more or less shared by all but the hardened gamblers of the establishment:—

The evils of speculation, in common with many more fellows
here, I much deplore; but at the same time, when three-fourths
of the business is of that nature, what is the alternative
to most Stock Exchange men? Either starvation or gaining a
livelihood by means which one’s conscience tells you to be
wrong; and human nature is not proof against the temptation.
That is the naked truth, not to mince matters; and God knows
it is an awful fact, to those who give any thought to these
things. I am perfectly certain that the majority of Stock
Exchange men loathe the business, and would be glad to get out
of it. The subject is never absent from my mind. I have felt in
a great strait over it for years. God grant that I may get out
of it somehow; but how, He only knows. It seems queer to write
like this to a stranger, but you have struck such a chord of
sympathy that it is a relief to unbosom one’s mind.

The above remarks also apply to the produce and metal exchanges. The misery caused in Lancashire and elsewhere by American gamblers cornering the cotton market is calling the attention of merchants to this branch of the subject, and with a little goodwill on the part of the Governments concerned there should be no insuperable difficulty in framing regulations which will greatly hamper, if not destroy, the possibility in future of such proceedings.

CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY

Thus in England, at the commencement of the twentieth century, the world of society, commerce, finance, and athletic sport is saturated with gambling, more or less veiled or entirely open. Individual and family ruin from it in all classes is frequent; and there are thousands of cases stopping short of this, but entailing, besides material loss and suffering, the lowering of the moral and mental nature, thus affecting the intellectual and religious fibre of the people. But the evil to the nation does not stop here. Until lately, at all events, the highest Courts of Law, as well as the lower ones, did not escape the indirect taint, and even now politicians and office-holders, who would be ostracised in Japan, continue to allow themselves, and very often their households, to be deeply involved in gambling transactions in their homes, their clubs, and with low practitioners of the race-course ring, their children in numberless cases copying the evil habit. A young heir to a peerage, a candidate for a seat in Parliament, whose father is considered to be a great political light and would wish it to be supposed that he is not without reforming zeal, although fencing with the question of the betting ring, boasted to a companion of his sudden acquisition of £2000, laughing at the idea of having worked for it, and explained that it came from the bookmakers at one meeting. The public services are corrupted, particularly the Police and the Post Office, the latter institution rendering many unnecessary services to the gambling system, in the profits of which it largely shares, and not making the special efforts which we see in the United States and elsewhere to hamper professional gambling. The nation as a whole is, it may be hoped, too healthy in a moral sense to allow a further continuance of this social plague without a great effort to grapple with it; but the bitter experience of the nineteenth century demonstrates how futile it would be to rely solely, or even to any great extent, upon the unaided attempts of educational persuasion to root it out. These, indeed, must not be relaxed, they must be increased and multiplied, and should be supplemented by more extensive and systematic endeavours, aiming at improved conditions of life for the poor, and further amelioration of health, and opportunities for recreation; but betting and gambling should also be made, as they can be made, by amended and better applied legal regulations, far less profitable, and more difficult, dangerous, and disgraceful, whether for the rich or the needy. There need be no real interference with the liberty of the subject; for that liberty, regarded in a true light, should not confer any licence to trade upon the ignorance, weakness, or folly of others, which is the characteristic of all gamesters, and not least of those belonging to the professional betting system.

STOCK EXCHANGE GAMBLING

By A. J. WILSON

Nothing is easier than to heap abuse upon the Stock Exchange and to place to its debit every crime of which the gambler can be guilty. And all the abuse would have a sediment of truth beneath it, for infinite are the evils that have grown up and spread their roots far and wide through all strata of modern society since the day when dealing in stocks and shares first became a passion or a habit. True as this is, and numberless as may be the demoralising consequences of indulgence in the habit of stock and share “bulling” and “bearing,” it would be none the less false and unjust to lay upon Stock Exchanges and their members all, or even half, the blame for the moral undermining of society that may ensue from subjection to the hazards of the play. In many of its functions the Stock Exchange has always done admirable service to civilised mankind, and the great majority of the members of all such institutions are men as upright, as humane and high-principled as could be found among any body of merchants in the world. It is not their fault but often their misfortune that the spirit of unbridled lust after unearned wealth should so continually strive for the mastery and so often become dominant in their business.

From the point of view, however, of the highest ideal of national morality, it is unquestionable that the trade of the stockbroker is of tainted origin. In this country the business began in an organised sense when William III. founded the National Debt and called the Bank of England into existence to furnish him easily with the means to carry on his Continental wars; and an evil day surely it was for the peace of the world, for the progress of mankind and civilisation, for the masses of those who toiled in all countries endowed with a settled form of government, when national debts were invented—debts laid upon the shoulders of the people without either the intelligent or deliberate sanction of those called upon to bear the load, or adequate estimate of the consequences in any direction.

We must, however, in most things take the world as we find it, and in spite of my hatred of all debts, and of my belief that debt never paid off in the long run ruins the debtor, whether individual or state, it has to be admitted that good of many kinds came out of evil in this instance. Debt, by the intermediary of the banker, begat credit; and credit, based upon a security which was reliable, the fruits of a nation’s labour and enterprise, gave an irresistible impetus to that industrial and mercantile expansion which has carried the prosperity of the United Kingdom to heights never before seen on earth, and changed the course of human progress everywhere. Imagine what might have happened if the banker’s utilitarian fiction, which treated the symbols or book entries of moneys spent in wars as so much realised wealth, capable of being utilised to call still more wealth into existence, had never been allowed to have free play. The nation would have perished beneath the dead weight of its obligations. Called upon to find the interests of the debts imposed upon it, out of resources suffering continual depletion, unstimulated by any new capital beyond what the minority might or might not have been able to furnish at the moment out of its savings, it would have sunk lower and lower in poverty, until its condition might have become one of hopeless anarchy.

The banker and the stock-jobber between them saved England from that fate—unconsciously, perhaps, but they none the less saved it. Their operations often exhibited a kind of inverted, topsy-turvy communism. Gravely treating the promises to pay emitted by governments of all degrees of irresponsibility as the inviolable obligations of the people at large, they used these promises and symbols of wealth already dissipated as the bases on which to rest further credits granted to joint-stock enterprises—to South Sea bubbles no doubt, but also to East India companies, Hudson Bay companies, mining companies, canal companies, adventures of all kinds, some of which outlived the manias amid which they came into existence, and survive in one form or another to this hour. Throughout modern history, the part played by debt in engendering credit, in calling capital into existence as it were out of nothing, and providing the means to carry out great undertakings by whose completion alone could the credit-born capital become living and real, has been such as to transform the world, girdle and seam it with railways, bind it together by electric cables, and cover its oceans with ships almost as sure and safe in their comings and goings as a suburban railway train. In ways almost infinite, credit was created to represent assets not yet in being; and, by putting in pawn of previously existing debts, and through the intermediary of banks, it drew out hoards from the keeping of the thrifty. Dead capital—capital spent—came to life again as it were, and was a potent agent for the advancement of mankind in civilisation. By this means modern nations not only stimulated their manufacturing industries, awoke and encouraged inventiveness, spread their productions over the whole world, but developed cities at home and made life bearable for aggregates of population whose healthy existence would have been impossible under the conditions prevalent, say, at the close of the Napoleonic wars and for long after.

Many other forces doubtless were at work so far as England alone is concerned—wealth drawn from India, the tireless energy of the race, the backwardness of other nations—but it was in no small measure the impetus supplied by those portions of our otherwise intolerable National Debt, utilised as a means of creating credit through our banks, that the resources and energies of the nation, and such forces as it drew from the yearly accretions of its savings, the ever-increasing fruition of its accomplished enterprises, were given full scope. In this development the Stock Exchange played a leading part. Without it as intermediary, little progress could have been made. Human nature rather than the share market must therefore be blamed for the manias and delirious gambling by which every step in the triumph of man over the forces of nature, of time and space, has been accompanied. The younger generation does not remember the days of the railway mania, when men went demented over wild and hopeless-looking projects, and rushed worthless shares to fantastic premiums in the height of the disease; but amid that insanity the warp and woof of our present network of roads came into being. There were enormous losses inflicted upon the multitude by the collapse, the always inevitable collapse; but good work was none the less done, progress made. Again, I may say, had the masses of mankind been capable of obeying high ideals, all this could have been avoided. It is possible to conceive a state governed by a spirit of mutual help and wholesome brotherliness in citizenship, wherein all would have been united according to their means to build these new iron highways for the good of the whole community, not for private gain; but it is vanity to think thoughts like these, men being what they are. The one effective force that could be relied on to attract the necessary capital to any enterprise is cupidity in one degree or another, the desire for individual profit. It may be the restrained and wholesome acquisitiveness of the man who merely seeks a safe repository for the fruits of his thrift, but more often it is the greed which cherishes the desire and hope of excessive and untoiled-for profit.

A subject full of temptation to the student of human passions is provided by the history of Stock Exchange _furores_, but I cannot pursue it. I will only cite some characteristics as ground for suggestions towards the abatement of admitted evils. Their eradication, I fear, is beyond hope until the spirit of mankind changes and its ideals. Certain characteristics stand out prominently to distinguish Stock Exchange gambling of the present day from that prevalent before the first Limited Liability Act, that of 1862, came into force. Previous to that date gambling in stocks had been confined to a limited class of the wealthy, whether aristocratic or professional—to the narrow, plutocratic classes and their immediate flunkies and hangers-on; but after the Limited Liability Act of 1862 gave definite form to this kind of joint-stock enterprise and enlarged the field of operations, speculation gradually became the fashion with classes of people hitherto unfamiliar with it, and the fascinations of the play attracted wider and ever-widening circles of society. After 1870 education came to the help of the share manufacturer, and by and by the financial newspaper, the professional tipster, the “bucket-shop” agencies outside the Stock Exchange, conducted with the avowed purpose of guiding the play so as to bring wealth to the gamblers, exercised their malign influence. Then came the £1 share, fully paid up, with no further liability, as the most attractive speculative instrument of them all. When I first knew the City, more than thirty years ago, no joint-stock undertaking whose projectors wished to be thought respectable could have been launched with a capital composed of £1 shares, whereas now very few companies of any sort are constructed on any more substantial-looking foundation. Mines, even gold-mines, in the early days of limited liability were rarely launched as joint-stock undertakings with shares of merely £1 nominal value. Nowadays, shares of 5s. nominal value are not uncommon in the case of such companies, and a few months ago the shares of several prosperous Indian gold-mines were subdivided into half-crown units, really in order to facilitate market dealings, _i.e._ gambling, in them over a wider field.

By the aid of the £1 share, all manner of enterprises have during the last fifteen years, or since 1890, been converted into joint-stock companies on the basis of an excessive capitalisation that would have been impossible to the same extent under the old fashion of the £10, £20, £50, or £100 share; and the losses consequent upon the unprincipled rapacity of the promoter, gratified by means of this ensnaring instrument of speculation, have been greater and more widespread than those inflicted upon an easily deluded public by all other forms of joint-stock swindling put together. When the new fashion was just coming into favour, one of the shrewdest members of the Stock Exchange, a broker of high character, predicted to me that it would be so. Talking of railway manias, shipping manias, and the losses they have caused, he remarked that they were “trifles to what the public is going to suffer through the £1 share.” Not many years after this opinion was expressed to me, the nation plunged into the South African gold and diamond mine dementia, with results not yet by any means fully visible, but whose harvest of loss and affliction has already transcended in magnitude and in the numbers of the victims all the plagues of this sort that have preceded it.

It looks so easy for the “small man,” as the City slang would put it, to have his “little fling” with a £1 share. Even when such share rises to five, ten, or twenty times its nominal value, it still seems easy, tempts the multitude more perhaps than when it may be at a discount, and there are such facilities for indulgence in the passion to make money without effort, with “no risk at all,” as the bucket-shop puffer is ever iterating. The market gives every facility, is ready to lend its means to the player, to smooth the field for him at the start. He need not pay for the shares he buys. The dealer and broker will “carry” them for him fortnight after fortnight, as each market “settlement” comes round, lending the money at handsome rates of interest, and charging an infinitesimal commission, or, perhaps, no commission at all, for performing this necessary operation. A man possessed of £50 may in this way be induced to speculate in £500 or £1000 worth of these small shares, staking his all. If the buyer wins, as in seasons of fever he often for a time does, the heavy interest he is charged does not affect him. Each fortnight, as the Stock Exchange account comes round, he pockets his “difference,” the sum left over as product of the advance in price after all charges have been met, and thinks himself on the high road to affluence. Initial success inflames the appetite, fresh purchases are made, probably before the earlier speculations are closed, and while the profits already reaped by the earlier gambles are being spent as fast as received. By and by reaction comes, losses accrue, expressed in “differences” to be paid instead of received, and the end is usually misery for years, for a lifetime, or sudden and irretrievable ruin. Slowly, and amid infinite suffering, this harvest of the South African, the Kaffir market insanity is now being reaped, as that of more than one Australasian and American rage of speculative abandon has been again and again during the present generation.

Is the disease thus indicated incurable—a disease whose course is invariable, whose end is profit, wealth perhaps, to one in a quarter of a million among the players, and to all the others various gradations of loss, from a few pounds disbursed in exchange for wisdom-fraught experience to complete ruin and social degradation? Yes, I believe it to be incurable, especially in a society constructed with such all-pervading artificiality as ours. One’s first impulse is to cast unmitigated censure upon the gambler; but that also would be unjust. The motives of mankind are mixed always, and at the beginning the impulse which starts the speculator in shares on his downward course is oftener than not at least half laudable, is at the worst the product of a man’s surroundings, of the vanities of life by which he may be lured. Constituted, moreover, as the social economy of modern England is, the great bulk of our fellow-citizens have no assured foothold in the land of their birth. They toil without hope, and see only privation or absolute want at the end of the day’s work—be it long, be it short. Essentially we are a nation of nomads, uprooted from the soil, and with no assured hold on the means of existence, speaking of the mass, beyond what the weekly wage or yearly salary furnishes. What more natural, one may say inevitable, than that this divorcement should generate in a vigorous race a hunger after security, a craving for some refuge, some shield against the uncertainties of existence, a way of escape, perhaps, from the irksomeness of individual surroundings, the tyranny of a hard taskmaster, the caprices of employers, whose power over all beneath them is too often almost that of life and death. By their surroundings, by the circumscribed horizon of their life, the minds of many men are prepared for the tempter who comes to them with the promise of deliverance by means of a successful gamble on the Stock Exchange. Others, again, are moved merely by vanity, by false standards of social wellbeing, by jealous emulation of those who may seem richer than they are, for is not the possession of money our one standard of “wealth” and wellbeing? To all such, once the plunge is taken, degeneration comes. A habit is established, and may become a craze, a passion, a lust that in time will devour all that is best in the heart and intellect.

Such seems to me a fair summary of the psychology of gambling, and I do not see how its ravages are to be stayed, the disease eliminated from society, without radical changes in its structure implying loss of privilege and an abatement of class selfishness by the few who now stand apart, the nation’s drones and hive-harriers, or without the cultivation of higher ideals than those implied in mere purse-proud social emulation. And of one thing I am sure; the London Stock Exchange can do little or nothing to check the ravages of this social canker, nothing effectual can be done in any Stock Exchange of them all. To expect bodies of men, associated together for purposes of gain, in the conduct of their daily business to lay down self-denying rules for their conduct, is not merely unwise but futile. The more the organised groups of stock-jobbers and brokers doing business at particular centres called Stock Exchanges hemmed themselves in by restrictions established with a view to limit the facilities for play, for buying and selling, the more such business would be thrown into the hands of irresponsible outsiders, most, if not all, of whom are mere vultures and cormorants, devourers of the substance of all who fall into their hands. In a very real sense the saying is just that the less restricted, within well-regulated limits, the constituted market may be the greater is the safety of the public from fraud and loss. Often when the London Stock Exchange, by far the most powerful and best organised institution of the kind in the world, has attempted to bar the way to the mere speculator in certain directions it has been defeated. It refused many years ago to sanction dealings before allotment, that is to say, purchases and sales of a security before it was really in the hands of the market or the public. The dealings went on all the same, until the liberty had to be restored. Unto this hour many members of the “House,” as the Stock Exchange is affectionately called by its members, set their faces against gambling in “options”—against, that is, the system of play by which a speculator puts down so much money, parts with it for good, in exchange for the right to “call” for the delivery, or to give delivery, of a certain specified amount of a particular security—to “put,” the slang is—on a certain future day at a price fixed when the transaction is entered into. But this kind of pure betting business grows every year all the same, and is now of a magnitude an Act of Parliament could hardly do much to lessen. Against the force of human passions no Stock Exchange can hope to war with success, and I do not believe that any such body should be asked to impose self-denying ordinances upon itself, the only effect of which would be to drive the business away from it into channels more fertile still in ruin.

But if there is no root and branch remedy, there must be some palliatives. It ought to be possible to restrain and diminish the ravages of the share manufacturer and professional market thief, at the same time that the range of temptation was narrowed for the multitude. It should be possible to do this, and with goodwill something might be done even by the Stock Exchange. Take as example the habit now prevalent of introducing new securities of all kinds on the market without the preliminary of a prospectus. This habit has received a great stimulus from the latest attempts at company law reform, in virtue of which the liability of directors for statements in prospectus has been sensibly increased. To escape that risk, new companies are now launched without preliminary statements of any sort. Certain members of the Stock Exchange, acting in concert with the schemers outside by whom they are employed, begin to buy and sell shares in an undertaking whose very name may be until that moment unknown everywhere, and about which neither market nor public has any information whatever. By arrangements with the financial press, whose charges for such services are most remunerative, quotations representing these unreal sales and purchases are daily and weekly paraded before the public, often accompanied by vague general statements regarding the wonderful wealth this particular share represents. Attracted in this way, the ignorant presently begin to itch to take a hand in the game, and gradually, if times are favourable and what the contemptuous broker calls the “fool public” is “on the feed,” quite a lively market arises, whose end is the stripping of the outsiders by those who laid the snare. The end of the fraud comes afterwards, when the plotters have got safely away with their plunder. All that the public may have left is worthless shares. Dozens, one may say scores, of African and other swindles of this sort have been perpetrated during recent times of excitement, and now and then the Stock Exchange itself has been cheated. Surely it ought to require no great amount of self-denial on the part of this body to stop peremptorily all impostures conceived and carried out after this fashion. It need only refuse to grant a settlement of bargains in any share thus foisted upon the public until the whole of the facts relating to it are laid before its committee, and quotations in the official list ought never to be granted to any company until the whole facts regarding it have been properly laid before the public. In other words, I think nothing but good could arise even to the market were the Stock Exchange to enact a rule forbidding the introduction of any security on its floor by the members until full information had been published by those responsible for its inception, whether by prospectus or by properly authenticated and signed declarations.

Another reform within the power of the Stock Exchange that might do much good would be the prevention of dealings in shares that represent goodwill, and therefore, as a rule, merely the plunder of promoters. Often, as it is, vendors’ shares are not “good delivery” until after a certain time has elapsed. If this irregular and capricious usage, dependent really upon the action of those who found the company, were to be made an invariable rule, and if such shares were kept out of the play altogether until a reserve had been gathered against them to give them substantial value, one fertile cause of loss would be reduced to small proportions. The plunderings of the Cecil Rhodeses, Whitaker Wrights, Hooleys, and the like would in this way be circumscribed, although by no means stopped. Unhappily, as I hold, the mischief cannot be entirely stopped until the spirit of the nation changes.

Once the habit of “bulling” and “bearing”—of buying more than one can pay for or of selling what one does not possess—lays hold of a man, the disease is too often incurable. When the victim suffers loss—gets caught by the market, as he would put it—he doubtless suffers more or less acute mental agony according to his character, the traditions of honourable conduct he may possess, or the extent of his risk. Then his mood becomes that of the old rhyme: “When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.” Vows are registered never more to be caught in this snare; the mind is prey to remorse, and virtue is honoured. But let the danger pass, the threatened loss become a profit, and all is forgotten when next temptation comes. The player resumes the game, and, on a “tip” from some interested source, sells a “bear,” in the hope of robbing the unknown counter player through a fall in the price that will enable him to buy back at a profit and pocket the difference drawn out of such counter player’s resources. Or he buys a “bull” to effect the same purpose when a rise on the market shows a profit. Morally, I may say, there is not an atom of difference in the character of these two operations, unless it be found in the fact that the “bear,” the speculative seller, is on the average a man of wider intelligence than the “bull.” To the public and the market he is also by much the more valuable gambling animal of the two, because in proportion as a speculative account is oversold is the capacity of a market strengthened to resist shocks from bad news. The publication of such bad news becomes the signal for those who have sold what they do not possess to rush into the market and repurchase. This operation often causes prices to advance on bad news, and always steadies the market against disturbing influences, to the great benefit of the real holder, who is thus enabled to sell at a smaller loss than would otherwise be possible. Bad news on an over-bought account—on a market, that is, where the great majority of the players are holding securities for the rise on borrowed money—always brings disaster. From this point of view, the “bear” is much more useful to the genuine investor than his opponent; but morally there is nothing to choose, so far as the individual operator is concerned, between the two methods of speculating.

“Bulling” and “bearing,” it may be said, constitute the daily business of a large proportion of dealers, wholesale merchants in the Stock Exchange, and for them it is legitimate enough to sell according to their judgment what they have not got and buy what they could not out of their own means pay for. It is in their power to cut their losses always when such begin to accrue, and many amongst them close the day with their books “even.” That is to say, they have neither a “bull nor a bear open,” to use the market phrase. They are mere traders, whose judgment of the market tendencies guides them in taking the one course or the other for the day only. It is altogether different, however, for the outsider, the man amongst the public, whether he resides in the City, or at Land’s End, or in Connemara. Such cannot operate with rapidity, and usually act upon tips and prepossessions, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred prove fatal to their peace of mind and injurious to their pocket.

Is it, then, impossible to induce the multitude amongst the people to abandon this method of hunting after wealth without labour, for that is our only hope? A change in the spirit of the people, a higher sense of self-respect, a deeper regard for the community of interests which would lead a man to treat his neighbour as a man to be helped, not injured, would do more to put an end to this modern habit than any number of rules and regulations. It has been suggested that gambling could be almost entirely put an end to were sellers of shares to be compelled to hand in the name of the possessor, or the numbers of bonds where bonds are sold. Undoubtedly this would stop every kind of free-handed gambling, except by way of options; but could any such regulation be established that would apply to the irresponsible dealings of the outside gambler through bucket-shops? I think not. Moreover, any such regulation would in the long run be injurious to genuine holders of securities. Take the example of Bank shares. It is almost forgotten nowadays that, as a consequence of the banking panic of 1866, an Act, known as Leeman’s Act, from the name of the man by whom it was introduced and carried through Parliament, effectually stopped speculative dealing in Bank shares. These are now consequently exclusively an investment security. They cannot be sold without giving the numbers of the shares and the name of the holder out of whose possession the shares are to come. There is consequently never any “bear” account, that is to say, any account open in unspecified shares sold for the fall, in Bank shares, and unquestionably this immunity from attack has been most valuable in checking Bank scares when credit has become strained. But what would happen supposing a crisis arose through the failure of one or two important Banks? Would it be possible for frightened shareholders to escape their liability and sell out before the crisis became acute? No, it would not. The shares would simply be unsaleable on any terms; there would be no market for them at all, and each individual holder would be compelled to face his loss without chance of escape. From a moral point of view this may be all right—I am not objecting—but undoubtedly the acuteness of the disaster would be concentrated to a cruel and most ruinous extent upon the then existing groups of Bank shareholders.

Recently, when a panic threatened in Russian securities upon the Paris Bourse, the official brokers there notified to the outside market that they would not record sales of the bonds unless the numbers thereof were handed in with the order. This at once stopped speculative selling, but I doubt whether the consequence was not to weaken the market and to render the credit of Russia suspect amongst the multitude who, speculatively or otherwise, held this particular national debt. At any rate, the rule was very soon abandoned, and dealings resumed on the old footing. In Germany a number of restrictions and vexatious taxes have been placed upon Bourse transactions, especially those of a speculative kind, without increasing the health of the market or really diminishing the amount of gambling done. The business is transferred to other markets, very largely to London—that is all.

Again, it may be said that the English Government put an end to one form of gambling, still prevalent on the Continent, with complete success. Lotteries were put down by Act of Parliament, and the trade of the lottery-ticket jobber summarily stopped. That is true enough, but there is no analogy between a step of this kind and stopping gambling in actually existing securities. If lottery loans themselves had not been discontinued, it would have been impossible for any Government to stop the pernicious dealing in lottery tickets. If we could stop all issues of securities, wipe off the National Debt, Municipal debts, the intolerable burdens of Colonial debts, and turn all joint-stock undertakings into communistic organisations, there would be an end of Stock Exchange gambling, at least in any form now familiar to the public; but short of that I do not see how the legislature can interfere with effect without creating other, and perhaps worse, evils than those it sought to abolish. An example of legislative powerlessness has been furnished by recent efforts at joint-stock company law amendment. The Act of 1900, which was going to do so much to purify the atmosphere and limit the ravages of the unscrupulous promoter and his “front page” guinea-pigs, has really increased the mischief, as I have already pointed out. Gambling might be diminished were the State to increase the taxes upon speculative transactions, although I am doubtful; but any such increase would rather tend to emphasise the absurdity of the Gaming Acts. Through these Acts it is possible now for any speculator to repudiate his obligations, and cases frequently arise in the Law Courts where losses are in this way repudiated.

Possibly the law might be able to put down outside speculative agencies, which do an incalculable amount of mischief, and yet even there difficulties stand in the way. Are newspapers to be forbidden to insert the advertisements of these “bucket-shops”? Will the Post Office refuse to transmit their circulars? How far is it legitimate or safe, let alone wise, for the State to interfere in order to protect the fool from the consequences of his own folly? I cannot solve the problem; it perplexes me much and often, but the longer I think things over the less am I inclined to invoke the aid of the State in order to put an end to this social canker.

The remedy must come, I repeat, from the people themselves: from better instruction, from healthier views of what constitutes true success and respectability. There is an emulation in extravagance which has spread widely through all classes of society during the past two generations, and has now culminated in a vicious recklessness that does more to whet the appetite for gambling of all kinds than anything else. This spirit is not perhaps so visible in the country village, at the rural parsonage, or among the petty tradesmen in a small country town as elsewhere; not so patent to the eyes of the onlooker. We do not need to go so far: society in the West End of London is quite sufficient for illustration. The habits there have grown in extravagance within my time to a degree almost impossible to realise; and most people embraced in this word “society,” as well as thousands who are pressing to get within the magic circle, live beyond their means, struggle to eke out their inadequate incomes—inadequate through the standard set up by gambling on the Stock Exchange, often by ruining themselves.

Why cannot people exercise some moral restraint, or at least a trifle of common-sense? No system of gambling in existence treats the public with absolute fair play. The sharper is everywhere, but far less frequently in evidence on the Stock Exchange than anywhere else. It is none the less true that the mere charges of the market constitute a considerable handicap against the outside player. Supposing a man is induced to buy a security, the price of which at the date of his purchase is £1000. According to the character of that security, he will pay from 25s. to £5 to the broker he employs to carry through the transaction. This charge is really a very small payment for the work done—would be quite inadequate payment at its highest, did the market transact investment business alone. That money, however, is so much out of pocket at the start to be set against expected profit. Then there is what is called the jobber’s “turn.” The wholesale dealer in the market has always two prices. He buys at one price and sells at another, the difference being his immediate limit of profit. Assume such difference to be merely half-a-crown per cent, and the stock bought will cost the outside buyer 50s. more than he could have sold it at when the transaction was entered into. Say £5 altogether is thus against the outside buyer on the deal at the start. The security purchased will therefore have to rise 5s. per cent before he can get home, as the phrase is, without loss. If the profit, however, does not come along within a fortnight or thereby, arrangements have to be made to carry the transaction forward to a new account, as it is called. This involves interest on the money, which cannot, on an average, be less than 5 per cent per annum, or roughly another 50s. per fortnightly account. In addition, there is probably a small charge, representing £1 or 25s., made by the broker for arranging the fictitious purchase and sale by means of which this continuation of the bargain is effected. Let a speculative purchase be carried on in this way for a few months, and it will become evident to everybody that a very considerable rise must occur before the purchaser is able to sell at a profit after meeting all charges. In three months he may be £20 to £25 to the bad, assuming the price to remain where it was when he bought. If people would reflect in this way, and make calculations before they plunged into a gambling transaction of the sort, they would surely often hold their hands.