DESCRIBES A GREAT FINANCIAL STORM AND
EXHIBITS THOMAS DIBBLE IN A NEW CHARACTER.
It came steadily but surely, gently at first, like great storms come,
with a gradual lowering of the clouds and a gradual increase in the
wind. It began in a calm--a quiet, happy, pleasant calm--a calm that
may be typified by a man seated on the lawn at Barton, and smoking in
the shade, with sheep bleating at a distance.
It came out of a calm, we say--a delightful time of rising markets,
when the bulls of the Stock Exchange were in clover, and the bears at
fault. It began when most kinds of shares were at a premium; when all
sorts of companies were paying big dividends, and 5_l._ shares were
selling at 8_l._ and 10_l._; when everything was “looking up;” when
men bought to invest, and even bought one day to sell the next at a
profit. First, there was a whisper from the Continent which agitated
the financial atmosphere for a moment--the first breeze of the coming
storm. The bears sniffed it, but the bulls feared it not; and shares
for a moment wavered, only to recover and make the calm seem all the
more assuring. Then a whisper came from the New World, and there was an
Atlantic roughness about it at which the bears opened their nostrils
and sniffed with a hungry relish. The bulls wavered still in doubt, and
then in a sudden darkness the big clouds gathered, and the wind blew a
hurricane--blew tempestuously from the shores of France, with tributary
winds from Austria and Prussia, and local winds from St. Stephen’s.
Then the bears growled and frisked and bit and bellowed, and the
bulls fought hard and butted with their horns; but the bears tore and
lacerated them: for the financial storm had come, and there was panic
everywhere. The Genii of Finance no longer in the sun looked hideous
and fearful, and the magicians who had hitherto controlled them had
lost their power, because the world had faith in them no longer. The
story is not new; it crops up afresh once in about every eight or ten
years.
The newspapers did not describe the storm as we have described it. They
conveyed the intelligence in technical terms which made it hard and
biting:--“Orientals are now at 1¹⁄₄ to 1¹⁄₈ dis.; Credits, 1 to ⁷⁄₈;
Unity shares have declined to 8 to 7¹⁄₂ dis.; Imperials have gone to
5¹⁄₈ to 4³⁄₈ dis.; Discount Company, ³⁄₈ to ¹⁄₄ dis.; Overton, Baker
and Co.’s Bank, ⁷⁄₈ to ³⁄₄ dis. The railway market continues dull,
with a downward tendency; there is a further reduction of ¹⁄₄ to ¹⁄₂
per cent. in Great Western, South Eastern, Great Eastern, and Great
Northerns.
“Another serious failure is reported from Liverpool, and the directors
of the Bank of England have to-day raised the minimum rate of discount
from 6 to 7 per cent.”
This was the fragmentary way in which the newspapers indicated the
financial storm, and the figures started up in the night, like fiends,
haunting the pillows of many a man, in town and in country, who had
been induced to “speculate” in a few finance and other shares “just to
make a little money”--men who had never touched shares before, and did
not even know the “beastly” title affixed to professional buyers and
sellers on the Stock Exchange. To them a bull meant an animal that was
dangerous in the fields, and grand at agricultural shows; and a bear
was an ugly brute that climbed up a pole at the Zoological Gardens.
William Jones the grocer and Timothy Robinson the draper, who had been
induced to buy a few Overtons, or Orientals, at 3 premium, in the hope
of selling at 5 or 6 premium before the half-yearly meeting, were
nothing more than bulls, nevertheless, in Stock Exchange phraseology,
and only to become despondent and miserable bears at 5 or 10 discount.
“Been bulling the market, Mithter Dibble? Pray explain yourself, and
don’t offend a woman’s thenthibilities by such terms as that,” said
Mrs. Thomas Dibble, leaning back in her chair, and vainly endeavouring
to thread a needle.
“Bulling means selling, my love,” said Thomas, trembling; “selling
shares without having them, you see, and----”
“Mithter Dibble, it isn’t as I wish to be severe on you, but I begin to
suspect you are drunk, thir!----drunk, drunk, drunk,” said Mrs. Dibble,
laying down her needle in despair, and rapping the table with her
thimble.
“You may call I what you likes,” said Dibble, with a tremendous effort
to be bold; “but I’m sober enough. I wishes I were drunk.”
“Good heaventh! why, whath come to the man? How dare you wish you were
drunk, thir--how dare you, thir!”
“Dare? I tell you, Maria, I’m a miserable bull, a dead-beat bull, as
ever was,” said Dibble, weeping.
“You’re a beast, if that’s what you mean,” said Mrs. Dibble, convinced
that her Thomas was intoxicated.
But Dibble was only suffering from the panic. He had been tempted by
the financial sunshine--and Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs--and had bought the
shares of a company that had made a call and failed, and of another
whose shares had fallen from 10_l._ a share to 5_l._ worse than
nothing. It had been brought about in this wise: Mr. Gibbs was indebted
to Mr. Dibble for many little acts of courtesy and attention, as a
visitor to Mr. Richard Tallant at the Iron Company’s offices. Thomas
had always a chair and a polite submissive word for Mr. Gibbs, and so
one day that gentleman, arguing correctly that Mr. Dibble must have
saved a few hundred pounds, kindly showed that confiding porter how to
make a few hundreds more; and Mr. Thomas Dibble, in the simplicity of
his nature, became a bull, without the knowledge of his better-half.
Whispers of the panic had come into the big company’s offices where
Thomas portered it, and at last he began to understand that his five
hundred pounds were tossed about in the storm, and liable to be sunk
and lost for ever; and on the day in question, when Thomas went home
and confessed that he was a bull in a panic, and other similarly insane
things, Mr. Gibbs had explained to him his position, and advised him to
consider his money lost for the present, but consoling him with stories
of the immense losses which other people had suffered.
“Mr. Gibbs advised me to do it,” said Dibble.
“Do what, you fool?” shouted Mrs. Dibble, who lost all patience with
him.
“Speckerlate with the five hundred pounds which we had at the bank,”
said Thomas.
“We had--_we_ had, Mithther Dibble: it wath my own money, Thomath, and
you have never dared to touch it?” said Mrs. D., her face white and her
eyes flashing.
“I touched it to make a thousand of it, Maria; that were my full
intention.”
“Oh, you monthter! Oh, Dibble, Dibble! Oh, Thomath, Thomath! I thee it
all--you have lost the money!”
“Ise afraid on it, that I be,” said Dibble. “The bull sells, and the
bear buys. ‘If you bear the market now,’ Mr. Gibbs says, ‘you may get
right;’ but, oh Lord! oh dear, Maria! Ise quite lost! What be I to do?
what be I to do?”
Poor Dibble lifted up his arms, and looked appealingly towards his
furious wife, who sunk back in her chair with a scream for water. The
wretched bull, glad of any diversion from the main point, rushed to
his wife’s assistance. She had really fainted, this strong-minded Mrs.
Dibble, who could think for everybody, and conduct the government of
the country if necessary.
She had often said that had she been a man she would have been in
Parliament; and not only in Parliament, but a cabinet minister. There
was nothing too high for the giant intellect of this domineering wife
of poor Thomas Dibble; and yet here she lay like a dead thing, with her
cap on the floor, her arms lying helplessly by her side, and Dibble
bathing her face, at the loss of five hundred pounds. But it was the
insubordination of Dibble which affected her more than the loss of
the money, and when she came to herself again, wet and soddened, she
declared she would never forgive him.
“Never, Thomath, tho don’t athk it; ith not ath I bear malithe, nor
am mean, but for a woman who hath loved like me, and refuthed the
greatetht offerth from noblemen--I say, for one who gave her heart up
ath I did, it ith not in nature to forgive thuch detheption as yourth,
Thomath Dibble. How true it ith, ath it ith written, that the heart of
man ith dethperately wicked.”
And Mrs. Dibble went to bed with her woes, locked her door, and left
the wretched Thomas to bemoan his unhappy lot in darkness and in the
kitchen, where he fell asleep by-and-by, and dreamed that he was a
bull being devoured by a horde of bears; but he awoke, and found that
he was only in danger of being eaten by crickets and beetles, which
held great meetings on the Dibbleonian hearth-stone every night. They
were no doubt greatly astonished to find poor Thomas lying there all
his length; for their investigation of him was very minute, much more
so than Thomas liked, who jumped upon his feet, and roared and kicked
until Mrs. Dibble, certain of thieves and murder, opened the window,
and cried “Fire!” and then, being a strong-minded woman, jumped into
bed, and covered her head with the bed-clothes.
Happily, Paul Somerton came home just in time to put matters right, and
induce Mrs. Dibble to admit Thomas to her room, at least for her own
protection. Poor Dibble said next day he would rather have slept with
the beetles; he was sure he should have been happier in the kitchen,
after all.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the storm in the City was raging, and spreading far away
to all points of the compass. Though the moon shone forth calmly, on
Cornhill and Lombard-street, on Threadneedle-street and on the Stock
Exchange, through all the night the storm raged in men’s hearts; it
tossed men and women on their beds, and shook giants of finance where
they lay sleepless and afeared: it tore along the railways, sealed
up in letters, which carried the tempest to Liverpool, Manchester,
Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and even to the cathedral city where
Mr. Phillips resided. They were like so many Pandora’s boxes, these
letters from the City the next morning, letting out on being opened
evils without end. Despair and ruin were in many of them, and all the
country was agitated with fear. If an invading host had been sailing
up the Thames, the consternation would not have been so great; for the
people could have gone forth and done battle with the foe. But there
is no fighting a financial storm,--no contending with Stock Exchange
terrors.
After the arrival of Pandora’s letters, there went forth into the
country flights of telegrams,--electric pigeons which settled in
crowds with their missives in all the towns of England, and the storm
increased tenfold with the excitement of the electric current.
During the morning hundreds of bulls put on bear’s clothing, and the
shares of Overton, Baker, & Co., began to fall; and in the afternoon
the leading discount-house in the country gave way to the pressure: and
then fresh flights of electric pigeons went forth into the towns that
Overton, Baker, & Co., had failed for ten millions of money.
You may fancy that this panic bears a strong likeness to the one which
has only recently occurred. Panics are closely akin, and therefore much
alike. If the crash of 1866 enables you the better to realise that
which forms part of the present history, so much the better. Thomas
Dibble will never forget in which panic he lost his wife’s five hundred
pounds, and how he suffered by his mad efforts to replace the money.