After the war fever had subsided with the
peace of 1815, the fluctuations in Consols
reached the next most marked point in 1819,
with the resumption of cash payments by the
Bank of England. These securities then dropped
from seventy-nine to sixty-four seven-eighths,
mainly because Sir Robert Peel's (then plain Mr.
Peel) celebrated Currency Bill was passed in that
year, declaring the bank-note once more to be a
convertible security, payable in gold upon
demand. There ought to have been nothing very
terrible in this—the mere payment by the
country and a large trading corporation of a
just debt; but the fundholders seem to have
thought otherwise, and hence a fall in their
confidence in England's stability, of more than
fourteen per cent.

The next marked fall in Consols, and of
course in all other Stock Exchange securities,
occurred in 1825, the year of bank failures and
bubble companies, when they went down from
ninety-four and a half to seventy-five. " The
glut of money," says Mr. Morier Evans, in his
excellent History of Commercial Crises, " and
the consequent low rate of interest that had
prevailed during the greater part of the year
1824, and at the beginning of 1825, had
induced private bankers to advance money on
securities not readily realised, and hence, when
the merchants applied to them for assistance,
they were unable to afford it, and several
commercial failures occurred as the commencement
of a state of distress which soon reached the
bankers themselves." A monetary panic soon
comes to a head, and is always fruitful in
curious anecdotes, most of them without any
foundation in fact. One is told on this occasion
about Lombard-street, which is worth relating.
A poor woman having met with a slight
accident, seated herself, to recover strength, at the
door of one of the banks. A crowd immediately
collected, and a report soon ran through the
City that the house was unsafe. In less than
an hour there was a fierce panic-stricken " run"
upon this bank, and with difficulty it was able
to meet the sudden demand upon it. One
thousand eight hundred and twenty-five saw
the downfal of some seventy-nine banks in
town and country, with fifty-eight branches,
whose liabilities amounted to fourteen millions
sterling. The loss to their customers on the
liquidation of these concerns, was about three
millions and a half; and the loss in the next
year (1826) by twenty-five similar failures was
about a million and a half.

From 1825 to 1830 Consols appear to have
had a stormy time of it, and on the rejection of
the Reform Bill, in the latter year, they went
down from ninety-four and a quarter to seventy-
seven and a half. In these calmer days, the
rejection of a Reform Bill is seldom marked by any
sinking variation in the funds more alarming
than one-eighth, thereby showing that the fund-
holders value the rejection of such measures at
exactly half-a-crown.

In 1847, the famous year of the railway crisis,
Consols again went down from ninety-four to
seventy-eight seven-eighths. The railway
projects that had been stigmatised as " bubbles" in
1825, had all grown into substantial realities,
with hundreds of companions who called out
loudly for unlimited capital. There was at the
same time a rage for joint-stock speculation in
every conceivable branch of trade, though not
for so many schemes in the fish and dairy line as
there were in 1825. The potato disease, and
the consequent Irish famine in the autumn of
1846, and the French revolution of 1848, also
tended to make the timid fundholder nervous,
so that Consols were not what is called " firm"
for several years.

In 1851, notwithstanding the coup d'etat in
Paris in the December of that year, these
sensitive securities showed a strong upward
tendency, and maintained it until December,
1852, when they reached one hundred and one
and three-quarters—their highest price during
the present century. In 1853, the Turkish
complication and the Russian war came upon
the field, and the timid fundholder, after asking
one hundred and one, was willing to sell at
ninety, and in 1854 at eighty-five.

During all this time, and throughout all these
fluctuations in Consols, the timid fundholder
never had to complain that his dividends were
either lessened, or not punctually paid. On the
5th of January or the 5th of July every year,
when he applied for his three per cent per
annum, it was always ready for him, less the
income-tax. When his security stood " in the
market" at one hundred and one, he got no
more; when it fell to fifty, he got no less. He
was not conscious of being treated with more or
less respect by the dividend clerks at the Bank
of England according as he presented a consol
paper at one price or the other. They knew
nothing, officially, of the fluctuations out of
doors, and when he wanted to learn more upon
this interesting head, he had to visit the Stock
Exchange.

The market for the purchase and sale of
public securities has never stood very high in
general estimation. It has always been looked
upon as a mixture of Tattersall's and the
betting nuisance in Bride-lane. A stockbroker has
often been confounded with a stockjobber; a
stockjobber with a "stag," or outside hanger-
on of Capel-court. Every now and then the
neighbourhood of the Bank of England is
paraded by men with huge boards on their
backs advertising another " exposure of Stock
Exchange iniquities," and the booksellers in that
quarter are always well supplied with pamphlets
detailing various financial grievances, or putting
forward various financial theories. It is some
comfort to the Stock Exchange to know that it
is not abused in print half so much as the Bank
Charter is, and never will be, while two men out
of every three are gamblers, and want capital
to be as cheap when it is scarce as when it is
plentiful.

The Stock Exchange is a large square building
in the City of London, lying at the back of
the Sun Fire-office, near the Bank of England.