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Amidst their tenderness for our manufactures, and their regard for commerce, they have established a lottery for eight hundred thousand pounds, by which they not only take advantage of an inclination too predominant, an inclination to grow rich rather by a lucky hazard, than successful industry; but give up the people a prey to stockjobbers, usurers, and brokers of tickets, who will plunder them without mercy, by the encouragement of those by whom it might be hoped that they would be protected from plunderers.
Too many of these stockjobbers and kingjobbers have come into our legislature or rather, too many of our legislature have become stockjobbers and kingjobbers. However, the voice of the people is beginning to make itself heard, and will probably cleanse their seats at the next election."
From his last play, "The Stockjobbers," performed in November, 1692, while its author was on his death-bed, the historian introduces an entire scene into his text.
Beckford, the famous Lord Mayor of Chatham's day, was father of the author of Vathek, who married an earl's daughter and became the father of a duchess. The Barings, descendants of a German pastor, settled in England early in the century and became country-gentlemen, baronets, and peers. Cobbett, who saw them rise, reviled the stockjobbers who were buying out the old families.
The Earl of Sunderland endeavoured to answer all objections; and, on the question being put, there appeared only seventeen peers against, and eighty-three in favour of the project. The very same day on which it passed the Lords, it received the Royal assent, and became the law of the land. It seemed at that time as if the whole nation had turned stockjobbers.
The stockjobbers, ever on the alert for a new speculation, dealt largely in tulips, making use of all the means they so well knew how to employ, to cause fluctuations in prices. At first, as in all these gambling mania, confidence was at its height, and everybody gained.
The purpose is to show that the Reformation was 'engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy, and cherished and fed by plunder and devastation, and by rivers of English and Irish blood. Briefly, it is the cause of every evil that has happened since, including 'the debt, the banks, the stockjobbers, and the American revolution. In proving this, Cobbett writes in the spirit of some vehement Catholic bigot, maddened by the penal laws.
Lewis shut himself up in his oratory, confessed, received the Eucharist, and gave orders that the host should be exposed in his chapel. His wife ordered all her nuns to their knees. London was kept in a state of distraction by a succession of rumours fabricated some by Jacobites and some by stockjobbers.
For the rest, the Emperor's mother was to be styled Madame Mère; his sisters became Imperial Highnesses, with their several establishments of ladies-in-waiting; and Paris fluttered with excitement at each successive step upwards of expectant nobles, regicides, generals, and stockjobbers towards the central galaxy of the Corsican family, which, ten years before, had subsisted on the alms of the Republic one and indivisible.
It represented the device by which the hard-earned wages of the labourer were being somehow conjured away into the pockets of Jews and stockjobbers. The classes which profited by this atrocious system formed what he called the 'Thing' the huge, intricate combination of knaves which was being denounced by the Radicals though with a difference.
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