Читать книгу The Representation of Business in English Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Reactions to this new financial machinery were mixed. Some welcomed them, but many criticised them. The fiscal-military state created huge vested interests which depended on the success of the novel experiment in public credit. The members of the financial corporations and those who serviced them in the stock exchange, together with the bureaucrats employed in the revenue system, not to mention the armed forces, all had a stake in it. Among those who welcomed its creation were the subscribers to the stock of the three great companies. These numbered around ten thousand individuals, about a third of whom were proprietors of Bank and East India stock. They were overwhelmingly based in London and the Home Counties and derived their incomes largely from non-landed sources. Relatively few landowners had surplus capital to invest in Bank, East India or South Sea stock. Spokesmen for the landed classes were very critical of the “monied interest,” as the investors in government loans were called. Thus J. Briscoe wrote A Discourse on the Late Funds of the Million Act, Lottery Bank and Bank of England Shewing that They Are Injurious to the Nobility and Gentry and Ruinous to the Trade of the Nation, in which he argued that they were

like a canker, which will eat up the gentlemen’s estates in land and beggar the trading part of the nation and bring all the subjects in England to be the monied men’s vassals.³

In 1709 Henry St. John observed that

we have been twenty years engaged in the two most expensive wars that Europe ever saw. The whole burden of this charge has lain upon the landed interest during the whole time. The men of estates have, generally speaking, neither served in the fleets nor armies, nor meddled in the public funds and management of the treasure. A new interest has been created out of their fortunes and a sort of property which was not known twenty years ago is now increased to be almost equal to the terra firma of our island.⁴

Jonathan Swift inveighed against this new monied interest the following year in the Examiner, observing that

through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country in the world.⁵

He pursued the same theme vigorously in The Conduct of the Allies. In it he claimed that in William’s reign “a set of upstarts . . . fell upon these new Schemes of raising Mony, in order to create a Mony’d Interest that might in time vie with the Landed.”⁶

By “a set of upstarts” Swift meant the Whigs who came to power under William III. For the dispute over the conflict of interests allegedly created by the Financial Revolution got caught up in the disputes between the Tory and Whig parties of the later Stuart era. Tories claimed to represent the landed interest and accused the Whigs of cultivating the monied interest. The reality was of course different from the rhetoric. While most landowners probably were Tory, a significant minority were Whigs. And while most investors in the “funds,” as stock in the Bank and the East India Company came to be known, were Whigs, there were nevertheless Tory speculators too. But the rhetoric of party propaganda and polemic has a life of its own quite apart from reality. Thus in the years between 1945 and 1979 the Conservatives were identified with the middle class and the Labour party with the working class, despite the fact that some business and professional voters voted Labour while many more workers voted Conservative.

Certainly Whig writers like Joseph Addison set themselves up as spokesmen for the monied interest. On 3 March 1711 he published an essay in the Spectator shortly before an unsuccessful bid by the Tories to wrest control of the Bank of England from the Whigs. It described an allegorical dream in which Mr. Spectator saw Public Credit as a beautiful virgin on a throne of gold. Upon the walls were such symbols of English liberty as Magna Carta, the Toleration Act and the Act of Settlement, which she cherished. Her health responded immediately to news reports which were hourly read to her, an allusion to the way that the stock exchange reacted to good and bad news. She was then menaced by six phantoms, Tyranny and Anarchy, Bigotry and Atheism, Republicanism and Jacobitism, the last in the person of the Old Pretender who brandished a sword in his right hand and was rumoured to have a sponge in his left. The sword he pointed at the Act of Settlement, while the sponge was to wipe out the National Debt. At their approach Public Credit fainted, while money bags piled behind her throne. Fortunately she was rescued by such friendly forces as Liberty and the future George I, the Protestant successor.⁷

John Arbuthnot, the Tory creator of John Bull, by contrast, was as critical as Swift of the City and its financial institutions. In his History of John Bull, law is an allegory for war, and the celebrated statement “law is a bottomless pit” is a metaphor for the vast public debt incurred by England in the War of the Spanish Succession. In order to finance his law suit “John began to borrow money upon Bank stock, East India bonds, now and then a farm went to pot.” This put him in the hands of scriveners—financiers who would lend on landed securities:

such fellows are like your wiredrawing mills, if they get hold of a man’s finger they will pull his whole body at last, till they squeeze the heart, blood and guts out of him.⁸

Not all Whigs were uncritical of the new machinery of public credit. Daniel Defoe could extol the City in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain and in his Essays on public credit and loans and yet deplore the Villainy of Stock Jobbers. Other Whig writers deplored not just the unscrupulous manipulation of the financial machinery but the machine itself. Thus in Cato’s Letters, published in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon attacked the Bank, the East India Company and the South Sea Company. “The benefits arising by these companies,” they asserted:⁹

generally and almost always fall to the share of the stock-jobbers, brokers and those who cabal with them; or else are the rewards of clerks, thimble men, and men of nothing; who neglect their honest industry to embark in those cheats, and so either undo themselves and families, or acquire sudden great riches; then turn awkward statesmen, corrupt boroughs where they have not, nor can have, any natural Interests; bring themselves into the Legislature with their peddling and jobbing talents about them, and so become brokers in politicks as well as in stock.

The bursting of the Bubble, when many who had speculated in South Sea stock were ruined, seemed to confirm the gloomy prophecies of those like Briscoe and Swift who had predicted that the Financial Revolution would be a social disaster. “The world is turned upside down, topsie turvy,” remarked Charles Gildon; “those who had plentiful fortunes are now in want, and those that were in want, have now got plentiful fortunes.”¹⁰

While most of these Cassandras were Tories, a significant voice amongst the critics of the City’s new institutions and their involvement with the Bubble was that of opposition or Country Whigs like Trenchard and Gordon. They were moved to write Cato’s Letters by the debacle. In them they called for those responsible to be brought to justice, including corrupt politicians as well as the Directors of the South Sea Company. “Shall a poor pick pocket be hanged for filching away a little loose money,” they demanded, “and wholesale thieves who rob nations of all that they have be esteemed and honoured?” They even published a letter, allegedly from the public hangman, “asserting his right to the necks of the overgrown brokers.”¹¹

What they shared with Tories was a suspicion of the Court, meaning the ministry and its adherents in the City, whom they accused of conspiring to create a government machine which would benefit monied and military men at the expense of the landed interest and the rest of the mercantile community. Since in their view the constitution was sustained by the stake landowners had in society and the economy, the new interests of money and the expanded machinery of the state brought into being to sustain a standing army threatened to subvert the constitutional freedoms enjoyed by freeborn Englishmen. They were resisting the growth of the military-fiscal state.