Note 10 — Chapter I · THE FUNCTIONS OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE

“A hundred years ago the use of the cheque was hardly known even in London, and an English country gentleman would have had infinitely more trouble in making a small investment than would nowadays a remote Australian squatter, or a wheat-grower in the wildest West of Canada. A letter posted to London from a distant village of Saskatchewan in 1910 would arrive with far more certainty, and perhaps not less speed than a letter posted in 1810 from a village in Sutherland or Argyllshire. A penny stamp with a cheque enclosed in a brief letter of instructions to the banker, and the thing is done. But the thrifty Scot of 1810 would have had the utmost difficulty, and great expense as well as risk, in converting a similar amount of cash savings into an interest-bearing security. In 1710 the thing would have been practically impossible. The Bank of England had only just been called into existence, and, in fact, there were no bankers, no brokers, and no Stock Exchange in the modern sense of the word. A man who wished to invest, without personally employing his capital, had practically no choice but to buy property and let it out at a rent, or lend his money on mortgage. Bank of England Stock or National Debt had just begun to be a political speculation for the moneyed Whigs in London. Merchant venturers might risk a large sum in a joint-stock voyage. Otherwise the average Englishman at the beginning of the eighteenth century A. D. was hardly better off for investment than the average Athenian in the age of Pericles, or the average Roman in the days of Cicero.”—“The Stock Exchange,” by Francis W. Hirst, editor of the Economist, Williams and Norgate, London.