Читать книгу: «Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420», страница 4

On calling at her lodgings, however, the next day, we learned that the lodger had decamped, after placing in the landlady's hand the solatium of another week's rent, as specified in the agreement—a week's notice or a week's money. Thus, for the space of five-and-twenty years, every now and then, did the Mysterious Lady turn up. Whenever we left home on a visit, we were sure, on our return, to find a card on the table, inscribed with the mystical characters—'Miss Jerningham.' No message left, no address given. The last time we ever saw her was in Hyde Park, walking arm-in-arm with her brother the general; and soon after we heard from the worthy veteran, that 'Bessie had gone on her travels again.'

If Miss Jerningham has really ceased to exist, her end was as mysterious and uncertain as the movements of her life. We say if, because we feel by no means sure on the subject, and should neither faint nor scream if she were to enter the apartment at this moment. It is about five years since General Jerningham set hurriedly off, in considerable dismay, for the scene of a direful conflagration in a northern county, wherein several unfortunate individuals had perished. The fire originated at a hotel, and the General had reasons for fearing that his sister might be among the number of the sufferers, for she was known to have followed that route. A notification likewise had appeared in the public prints, respecting an unknown lady, whose remains awaited the coroner's inquest, but afforded no clue whatever to recognition.

General Jerningham, however, came to the conclusion that he indeed beheld the mortal remains of his poor sister, although the only evidence he could obtain was the description given of her appearance by those who had seen her in life. He may have been influenced, likewise, by the fact, that the unfortunate lady had arrived at the hotel only on the previous day, and that no one knew who she was, whence she had come, or whither she was going. After making every possible inquiry, but without obtaining more satisfactory information, the General and his family put on mourning. The shock he had sustained produced bad effects on an already enfeebled constitution, and accelerated the veteran's decease. During his last days, he frequently alluded to 'poor Bessie' in affectionate terms; and we then gathered at least one fact relating to her past history. Her lover, it seems, had been suddenly carried off by malignant fever on the eve of their wedding-day, bequeathing to Bessie all his property; and Bessie, who had never known serious sorrow before, gave no sign, by sigh or lamentation, that she bemoaned the untimely fate of her betrothed, but withdrew herself from friends and connections, and became the restless, homeless, harmless being at whose peculiarities we had so often laughed, little thinking that tears of secret anguish had probably bedewed the pathway of her early wanderings. This very concealment of her grief, however, may have arisen from the peculiar idiosyncrasy which procured for her among all who knew her the name of the Mysterious Lady. But we will not talk of her in the past tense. We are so sure of her being alive, that we are even now anxious to conclude our visit to the pleasant house where this is indited, feeling a presentiment we cannot overcome, that the first interesting object we shall see on returning home is that mystical card which has so often startled and baffled our curiosity—'Miss. Jerningham.'

CASH, CORN, AND COAL MARKETS

A circle of a few hundred yards only in diameter, of which the centre should be the Duke of Wellington's statue in front of the Royal Exchange, London, would enclose within its magic girdle a far greater amount of real, absolute power, than was ever wielded by the most magnificent conqueror of ancient or modern times. There can be no doubt of this; for is it not the mighty heart of the all but omnipotent money force of the world, whose aid withheld, invincible armies become suddenly paralysed, and the most gallant fleets that ever floated can neither brave the battle nor the breeze? And this stupendous power, say moralists, has neither a god, a country, nor a conscience! To-day, upon security, it will furnish arms and means to men struggling to rescue their country from oppression, themselves from servitude and chains—to-morrow, upon the assurance of a good dividend, it will pay the wages of the soldiery who have successfully desolated that country, and exterminated or enslaved its defenders. Trite, if sad commonplaces these, to which the world listens, if at all, with impatient indifference. I have not a very strong faith in the soundness of the commercial evangel upon this subject; still, the very last task I should set myself would be a sermon denunciative of mammon-worship—mammon-love—mammon-influence—and so on; and this for two quite sufficient reasons—one, that I have myself, I blushingly confess, a very strong partiality for notes of the governor and company of the Bank of England and sovereigns of full weight and fineness; the other, that the very best and fiercest discourse I ever heard fulminated against the debasing love of gold, especially characteristic, it is said, of these degenerate days, was delivered by a gentleman who, having lived some seventy useful and eloquent years at the rate of about three hundred a year or thereabout, was found to have died worth upwards of L.60,000, all secured by mortgages bearing 7 per cent interest on the Brazilian slave-estates of a relative by marriage. But as an illustration of power—and power under any form of development has a singular fascination for most minds—I have thought it may not be uninteresting to glance briefly at a few of the more salient features of the metropolitan mammoth markets.

Standing, then, by the statue of the Iron Duke, we have the Royal Exchange directly in front, Princes Street and the Poultry immediately behind, Lombard Street and Cornhill on the right, Threadneedle Street and Lothbury on the left hand. What an Aladin glitter seems to dance upon the paper as the names of these remarkable localities are jotted down, containing as they do so large a number of world-famous banking and commercial establishments whose operations and influence are limited only by the boundaries of civilisation! Let us look closely at one or two of the chief potentates, principalities, and powers which are there enthroned.

The Royal Exchange, it is well known, owes its origin to the public spirit of Sir Thomas Gresham, who, close upon three centuries ago, built the first Exchange upon the spot now before us. It was destroyed by fire in 1666; the next more costly erection met the same fate in 1838, and has been replaced by the present very handsome edifice. On the entablature is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, who inaugurated Sir Richard Gresham's structure—the centre figure of a number of others emblematic of the all-embracing commerce of this country, and surmounted by the words: 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.' If you ascend the steps of the Royal Exchange, and pass into the body of the building, you will find a considerable number of business-looking, sleek, earnest men there, eagerly engaged in canvassing the general affairs of the world, and more especially their own particular ventures, hopes, anticipations, investments therein. If you are an artist, or indeed at all impressionable in matters of taste, you will, I fear, be painfully affected by a marble figure near the centre of the hall, which many persons assert to be a statue of the Queen of these realms—a calumny which I, as a loyal subject, feel bound most emphatically to deny. But the chief interest attached to this building is that it is here the celebrated association known as 'Lloyd's' has its offices—that Lloyd's, whose name is familiar as a household word in every country the sea touches, and who underwrite the maritime ventures of every commercial nation of the globe. Very marvellous has been the rapid development of this gigantic institution, from the small beginnings of a few persons meeting in a coffee-house, till now, when it may be said well-nigh to monopolise the maritime-assurance business of the world. Not even America has been able to set up a rival to it at all worthy of the name; and hundreds of the long-voyage vessels of the States, as well as of all European powers, are insured here. There is, to be sure, a continental association that has borrowed its name without leave, and dubbed itself the 'Austrian Lloyd's'—a designation which forcibly reminds one of the remark of Coleridge when told that Kotzebue assumed to be the German Shakspeare: 'Quite so,' replied the author of the Ancient Mariner, 'a very German Shakspeare indeed.' The correspondence of the true Lloyd's is of course immense—enormous: their agents are everywhere; and so admirably regulated does the vast machine appear to be that litigation between owners and underwriters is almost unknown. This is doubtless one of the causes of the prodigious success of the institution.

There is little more to notice in the Royal Exchange, except that the interior decorations are very tastefully executed; and therefore turn we now to this leviathan Bank of England—to the long, irregular, and by no means imposing line of building on our left. This is William Cobbett's Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, whose rickety constitution and failing powers—according to that bold and blundering financier—betokened almost immediate dissolution more than a quarter of a century ago. Other men, less dominated by unreasoning prejudice than the author of the 'Political Register,' deceived themselves into the same notion; and it is very possible that there are even now persons who hold the faith as it was in Cobbett—just as we are told in one of Mr Disraeli's novels, that the Greek mythology is still the creed of a fragment of humanity existing somewhere in the mountains of Syria. At all events, since the late Sir Robert Peel placed it beyond the power of the governor and company to indulge in dangerous or erratic courses, it is abundantly manifest that to doubt of the perfect stability of the Bank of England is tantamount to questioning the infallibility of arithmetic. In the vaults and coffers of this huge establishment there is at present—as we learn from the published weekly-returns, a device of Sir Robert's—the bewildering amount of between L.14,000,000 and L.15,000,000 sterling in gold and silver!—a sum of which the figures glide smoothly and glibly enough off the pen or tongue, but a mass of treasure, nevertheless, that few persons can realise to themselves a distinct and accurate conception of. And yet—and what an idea does the fact present of the multitudinous resources, the unrivalled industry, the latent power of this country!—all that heap of precious metals, all that is besides in circulation, with the addition of the bank-note currency, is comparatively nothing when weighed against the true and real exchangeable wealth of Great Britain; wealth of which this coined and convertible paper-money is merely the standard sign of value, the recognised medium by which all things are bartered. It is easy to give one or two significant and startling illustrations of this fact—significant and startling in other respects than in enabling us to see pretty clearly through the currency-cobwebs industriously woven from time to time amongst us. All the money in the three kingdoms, the whole circulating medium of the realm—gold, silver, copper, paper—does not certainly exceed, if it reaches, which is very doubtful, the national revenue for one year, to say nothing of local rates and burdens! And it would, moreover, require all the money circulating in Great Britain and Ireland, including notes to the last farthing, to pay for the spirits, beer, and tobacco consumed annually by the people of the United Kingdom! The note-issues of the Bank of England are about L.19,000,000; its reserve in gold and silver, as we have seen, is upwards of L.14,000,000 sterling: these amounts added together would no more than about discharge the alcohol and weed score of the country for little more than seven months! Lightning-flashes these, that throw vivid gleams over the industrial activity, resources, powers, plague-spots of this mighty, restless, enterprising, but far from sufficiently instructed or disciplined British people.

But let us enter the great money-temple. Very imposing to me has always appeared the army of clerks seated in saturnine silence at the desks, or gliding with grave celerity about the place, and variously employed in balancing enormous accounts, shovelling up heaps of sovereigns, receiving and distributing bank-paper of vast value as coolly and unconcernedly as if engaged in counting out so many chestnuts. A strange feeling must, I suspect, perturb the mind of a newly-appointed clerk amidst all that astounding wealth, until the genius of the place has so moulded his thoughts and perceptions, that he has come to regard himself as but one of the dumb and dead parts of a mighty machine, over whose action he has no more control than he has over the courses of the stars. All these issue, cheque, gold, bullion departments, with their numerous busy officials, are in truth but the husk and body of the establishment. They by whose will and breath it is animated and directed are nowhere at this hour to be seen. They met on this as on every other morning in their hall of inquisition—the Bank parlour—and decided there, without appeal, without reasons assigned, in the absence of the parties whose commercial reputation was trembling in the balance, upon the course of financial action to be pursued, and upon whose paper should or should not be discounted. A terrible stroke, sharper than a dagger could inflict, politely, blandly as it is performed, is that which falls upon a merchant for the first time informed that the Bank must decline to discount his bills! The announcement is usually received as smilingly as it is made. 'It is a matter of very slight consequence, etcetera;' but if you had been near enough, you might have noticed, as the clerk did, the quiver of the lip beneath that sickly smile, and that the face was as white as the rejected paper the merchant's trembling fingers were replacing in his pocket-book. And no wonder that he should be thus agitated, for the refusal has, he well knew, thrust him down the first steps of the steep and slippery descent, at the bottom of which lies bankruptcy—ruin! But these are ordinary downfalls, by the wrecks of which the busy haunts of commercial enterprise are paved; and we have other places to look in at. Before leaving the Bank, however, let us step a few paces to the left of the chief entrance. Now who would believe that in the very midst of this Mammon-temple, where space is of incalculable value, a large plot of greensward should have been jealously preserved, from which spring two fine elms, that from out the heat and turmoil of the place lift up their fresh leaves to the sky—bright, waving leaves, that as often as the sun kisses them, laugh out in sparkling triumph over the heated, anxious, jaded toilers and schemers below? Yet so it is.

Again in Threadneedle Street, and turning to the left, we reach, at the termination of the Bank-front, Bartholomew Lane, famous for nothing that I am aware of, save Capel Court, situate at about the centre, on the right-hand side. At the end of Capel Court is the Stock-Exchange, within whose sacred precincts subscribers only, and their clerks, may enter—a regulation strictly enforced by the liveried guardian at the door. But you can hear enough of the stentorian gabble going on within where we now are. Hark! 'A thousand pounds' consols at 96¾-96½.' 'Take 'em at 96¼,' is the vociferous reply of a buyer. 'Mexican at 27½-27; Portuguese fours at 32-7/8-32½; Spanish fives at 21; Dutch two-and-halfs at 50½-50¼:' and so roars on the distracting Babel till the hour for closing strikes. Much of this business is no doubt legitimate—the bonâ fide sale and purchase of stock by the brokers, for which they charge their clients the very moderate commission of 2s. 6d. per L.100. The ruinous gambling of the Stock-Exchange is another matter, and is chiefly carried on by 'time' bargains—a sham-business, managed in this way:—A nominally buys of B L.100,000 worth of stock in consols, to be delivered at a fixed price, say 96, on the next settling-day. It is plain that if the market-price of consols shall have fallen, by the day named, to 94, B wins L.2000—the difference between L.100,000 estimated at 96 and 94 per cent. A must pay these L.2000, or, which amounts to the same thing, receive from B consols to the amount of L.100,000 at 96, that in reality are procurable at 94. It is simply and entirely a gambling bet upon what the price of funds will be on the next settling-day. These transactions have been pronounced fraudulent by the superior courts, and liabilities so contracted cannot be legally recovered. It is, for all that, quite certain that these 'debts of honour' entail misery, ruin, often death, on the madmen who habitually peril everything upon the turn of the Stock-Exchange dice—dice loaded, too, by every fraudulent device that the ingenuity of the two parties engaged in the struggle can discover or invent. To the 'Bears,' who speculate for a fall, national calamity is a God-send. Especially a failure of the harvest, or a great military disaster like that which befell the Cabool expedition, is an almost priceless blessing—a cause of jubilant thanksgiving and joy. The 'Bulls,' on the other hand, whose gains depend upon a rise in the funds, are ever brimful of boasts, and paint all things couleur de rose. If the facts bear out the assertions of these bands of speculators—we prefer a mild term—why so much the better for the facts; but if not, sham-facts will answer the purpose, and to manufacture them 'is as easy as lying.' It is a remarkable fact, by the way, that out of the multitude of British fundholders there are not more than about 25,000 persons who are liable from that source to the income-tax—that is, who receive dividends to the amount of L.150 and upwards annually. The most numerous class of the national creditors eleven years ago—and there has, we believe, been no later return—were those whose annual dividends did not exceed L.50. These numbered 98,946: the next largest class, 85,069, were creditors whose yearly dividends did not exceed L.5; whilst only 192 persons were in the receipt of annual dividends exceeding L.2000.

But leaving these haunts of money-dealers, let us pass over to Leadenhall Street, turn down Billiter Street, and walk on till we reach Mark Lane and the plain, spacious, substantial, Doric-fronted building on the left hand, in which the great London Corn Market is held every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—the chief market, however, being that of Monday. There are no clamorous shoutings here. These crowds of staid, well-dressed, respectable people fly no kites, deal in no flimsy paper-schemes and shares. Their commerce is in corn, flour, seeds—the sustenance of man, in short. There are sober traders in realities, and the busy hum of voices has a smack of healthy traffic in it. It would so appear at all events, if we care not to look beneath the surface; and, in sooth, since the abolition of the sliding-scale has rendered the corn-supply continuous and regular as other staples, gambling to any ruinous extent has become almost impossible.

There is another great change apparent here; albeit this has been a very gradual one. A stranger will have remarked with surprise that there are but few, very few, of the knee-breeched, top-booted, double-chinned, jolly, old-class farmers amongst the numerous groups who are either watching their sample-bags and waiting for customers, or chewing and smelling handfuls of wheat and barley, and casting what they do not swallow on the flags, already carpeted with grain. Still in addition to a strong sprinkling of 'Friends,' there are, he perceives, a goodly number of stalwart, handsomely-dressed individuals, many of them wearing kid gloves, and carrying silk umbrellas neatly ensconced in oil-skin cases. There is a group, one of whom has just refused 45s. per quarter for a sample of prime white wheat. If we approach nearer to them, we shall perhaps discover their quality. As I guessed! These gentlemen are distressed agriculturists, who prefer selling their own corn to sending it to any of the numerous highly-respectable salesmen who occupy the offices round the two markets. There are scores here of these well-attired, healthy-faced, hearty-looking, stout-limbed, but distressed individuals present, with not one of whom I should have the slightest objection to dine to-day, or on any other day, for that matter. But we must beware of rash judgments. Appearances are often deceitful, and we know, besides, from high authority, that grief is apt to puff up and swell a man sadly at times.

There is no possibility, an eminent salesman informed us, of making even a proximate guess at the quantity of business done; neither, it appears, is there any reliance to be placed upon the amount of 'arrivals' as given, either in the newspapers, or in the private circulars issued weekly to the trade. Corn, in this market, is usually sold at a month's credit, with discount for cash. The buyer secures a sample of his purchase in a small canvas bag, and the seller is of course bound to deliver the quantity agreed for at the same weight and quality. There is one patent fact highly creditable to our British cultivators, which I gather from a trade-circular dated September 29, 1851, and this is, that foreign grains, wheats especially, do not command anything like such prices as the English varieties. The highest price of English white wheat is set down at 45s. per quarter; all foreign wheat is marked considerably lower: Russian is quoted at from 31s. to 33s.; whilst Egyptian and Turkish are marked from 24s. to 26s. per quarter; and fine American flour is quoted at a price considerably under 'English Households.' These are not signs of decrepit or faint-hearted farming.