takings blown up by the air of great words, and the name of some man of credit concerned to perhaps one hundred pounds for one five-hundredth part or share [the meaning probably is, for the fifth part of a hundred pound share], and yet at last dwindle to nothing."[1] Jobbing in the stock of the great chartered companies was now carried to such a length, that within the first nine or ten years after the Revolution shares in the East India Company had—"by the management of stock-jobbers," as Anderson affirms—been sold on the Exchange at all prices from 300 per cent, down to 37 per cent.—an extent of fluctuation belonging to a game of chance rather than to any legitimate commercial speculation. Successive acts of parliament testify to the rage for lotteries which had long prevailed, "Whereas," begins one passed in 1698, "several evil disposed persons for divers years last past have set up many mischievous and unlawful games called lotteries, not only in the cities of London and Westminster, and in the suburbs thereof and places adjoining, but in most of the eminent towns and places in England and dominion of Wales, and have thereby most unjustly and fraudulently got to themselves great sums of money from the children and servants of several gentlemen, traders, and merchants, and from other unwary persons, to the utter ruin and impoverishment of many families, and to the reproach of the English laws and government, by colour of several patents or grants under the great seal of England for the said lotteries, or some of them, which said grants or patents are against the common good, trade, welfare, and peace of his majesty's kingdoms;" and then the lotteries in question are declared to be one and all public nuisances, and all the grants to be void and illegal.[2] The evil, however, was not effectually remedied; for in 1710 and 1711 we find parliament still complaining of its existence, and resorting to new measures for the suppression of lotteries and other such delusive and fraudulent projects, of which advertisements, it is declared, continued to be daily published in the common printed newspapers
