STOCK-JOBBING.

New Zealander, Volume 9, Issue 782, 12 October 1853, Page 3

STOCK-JOBBING.

[From the “ Sydney Herald.”]

Contemporaneous with the expulsion of the Stuarts from England was the introduction of Stock Jobbing. William the Dutchman brought with him. those maxims of finance which had for some’time been naturalised on the continent of Europe, and which, with all their faults and all the abuses that have crept into the practice of them, were a vast improvement upon the haphazard disjointed systems of raising and expending revenues that had for centuries previously prevailed in England. Subsidies, tenths, fifteenths, benevolences, and ship money were but a clumsy mode of providing for the King’s necessities, compared with the negociation of large loans and the consolidation of the general revenue fund of the country, which has been characterized as Dutch finance. But as there are few things in this sublunary world free of some vice and contradiction, so the Dutch system of finance gave rise to the evil of Stock Jobbing, and all the efforts of Governments and Parliaments to suppress this evil have hitherto failed. Its ramifications are now spread through every country in Europe. It pervades all ranks ot society ; it permeates through every sinuosity. Princes and pawnbrokers, Quakers and bishops, merchants, ministers, bankers and railway kings, marchionesses and curates’ wives, all understand, more or less, the art and mystery of stock-jobbing. The South Sea Bubble, famous in the history of the Georgian era, was nothing compared to the jobbing of the lost twenty years. Queen Victoria’s faithful subjects beat their _ slow progenitors hollow at the game of premium and discount. Hudson is worth a dozen Laws, and Rothschild has utterly eclipsed the glory of the banking beaus in bagwigs who crowded Pope’s Headalley a century ago. Contemporaneous also with the discovery of gold and with the opening of steam communication, has been the extension of stock-jobbing operations to Australia. What South American mines were in 1825, what North American Internal Improvements were in 188G, what cotton speculation in 1841 and Railway Mania in IB4G —such is Australian gold-mining and banking company scheming in 1853. John Bull cannot devise any new money project without going mad upon it. Whether the natural propensity is irresistibly strong, or whether it is unduly fostered by injudicious legislation, the fact is that, every four or five years the London Stock Exchange is • the scene of jobbing operations in whch it is hard to say whether the victims of plausible prospectuses and false representations are more fools than the concoctors of those prospectuses and the authors of those false'representations are knaves. At all events, the fact is undeniable, that a .* parcel of scheming people in London periodically prey upon the public pocket; and in no instance, except perhaps in that of Mr. George Hudson’s doings seven or eight years ago, have more barefaced and more impudent frauds been practised than in the getting up of sixain companies for working our gold fields and for supplying us with paper currency. Considering the immense field which exists for the legitimate employment of British capital in Australia, in developing our pastoral, agricultural, mining, and manufacturing resources, it does certainly appear most monstrous that by the laxity of British laws in reference to the formation of Joint Stock Companies, so many mushroom projects should have been allowed to see the light, and it is the more to be regretted because the inevitable tendency of these frauds • will be to check to a considerable extent the flow of capital into those channels which would confer real benefits upon us, whilst the capitalist would derive a large and secure interest for his money. If the sums nominally subscribed for .miningspeculations, and banking abortions, were bona fide applied to the formation of railways, hot only would the colony he benefitted to an incalculable degree, hut the superabundant,

capital which now chokes the money market in England would be well, profitably, and permanently invested, and the annuitant on Australian public works would have no fear of a reduction of dividends for many a long year. We are glad to observe that the Imperial Government nave opened their eyes to the evil consequences of too readjr a disposition to second the views of mei’e schemers, mere seekers of premium on scrip. It has been decided that no charter of incorporation shall in future he granted to any Company with colonial objects to carry out, unless with the consent of the Colonial Legislature. This is a very wholesome measure. It is evident that for all legitimate purposes the local Government must be far better acquainted witli the necessities and deficiencies existing in the colony than can be any private individual or company of individuals at home ; and, although we cannot question the right of the Queen to grant a charter of incorporation to any English company, which Her Majesty may think proper with the advice of her Privy Council to grant, we are satisfied that this prerogative of the Crown, injustice to the colony, and no less in justice to the mother country, ought not to be exercised without a previous reference to the judgment and the authority of the colony.