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Updated: September 11, 2025
Cannon rattled through the streets. Couriers dashed backward and forward from the telegraph office to the war office. The poor starved the rich scarcely fared any better. Black hair had become white. Stalwart frames were bent and shrunken. Spies and secret emissaries lurked, and looked at you sidewise. Forestallers crowded the markets. Bread was doled out by the ounce.
In the towns, the forestallers hoarded flour, and sugar, and salt in their warehouses, to await famine prices. The vultures of troubled times flapped their wings and croaked joyfully. Extortioners rolled in their chariots. Hucksters laughed as they counted their gains. Blockade-runners drank their champagne, jingled their coin, and dodged the conscript officers.
In 1551 is the last elaborate act against regrators, forestallers, and engrossers, made perpetual by 13 Elizabeth, and only repealed in 1772. It recognizes all previous laws against them, but recites that they have not had good effect, and therefore in the first section gives a precise definition.
But the newcomers or their children soon learned of better opportunities to the south, where Maryland land sold for from £2 to £5 per hundred acres, and the up-country forestallers, such as Carter and Beverley, under-sold the Pennsylvania land office in order to attract settlers.
Some days after the riot the Lord Mayor issued a proclamation giving permission to "foreign bakers and others" to bake bread in Dublin; he also sent to all the churchwardens of the city to furnish him with information of any persons who had concealed corn on their premises; he denounced "forestallers," who met in the suburbs the people coming in with provisions, in order to buy them up before they reached the market; thus in a great measure justifying the rioters who were whipped and transported.
Political economy has taught us that those old bugbears of the statute law called forestallers and regraters are eminent benefactors, in as far as their mercenary instincts enable them to see scarcity from afar, and induce them to "hold on" precisely so long as it lasts but no longer, since, if they have stock remaining on hand when abundance returns, they will be losers.
I had never thought of going to Ammergau, and so, when reading of these shows, I had entertained no more hope of seeing one than of assisting at an auto-da-fe or a witch-burning. I went to the box-office to buy seats. But they were all sold. The forestallers had swept the board. I was never able to determine whether I most pitied or despised these pests of the theatre.
Gay equipages were seen in the streets; theatres, prosperous even during the Terror, were now filled to overflowing; gambling, whether in money or in stocks and assignats, was now permeating all grades of society; and men who had grown rich by amassing the confiscated State lands now vied with bankers, stock-jobbers, and forestallers of grain in vulgar ostentation.
But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost, stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at present are an almost intolerable nuisance.
Truly, it is well for honest men, but not so well for forestallers and regraters; but who heeds what befalls such foul swine, who filch the money from people's purses, and do not one hair's turn of work to help them?"
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