Such a system, it would seem, is all very well for the jobber, but quite unfair to the outsider and to the conscientious broker who is striving all the while to protect the interests of the public and maintain the welfare of the Exchange. Indeed, as it works out in London, the broker has all the worst of it in many ways. Even though the jobber “runs a book,” as the phrase is, his work is done at 4 P.M.--when the market closes--and if he is not doing a large business he may then follow his inclinations. Unless his business involves dealing in South Africans or Americans, his work is substantially completed with the official closing of the Exchange. But the broker, on the other hand, enjoys no such freedom. After the closing he must go to his office--for in the nature of things he must have one--and there he will find correspondence awaiting him, orders to be executed in the “Street markets,” and telephone messages to send to his customers. The mere fact that a London broker must use the London telephone is in itself a curse, for nowhere under the canopy is there a telephone service so dreadful and so exasperating.
Even in the ebb-tide of a dwindling summer business the London broker, who cannot begin his day’s correspondence until four, finds it difficult to leave his office until an hour long after his American colleague has played his eighteen holes or dressed for dinner. Aside from the horrors of the telephone service, this is due in a measure to the fact that they have no ticker in London and the mechanical efficiency with which this machine faithfully records all over America each fluctuation of the market, finds no counterpart in England. The broker in London has therefore to perform, in a measure, the work of the ticker in New York. Perhaps I should not say they have no tickers in London. In point of fact there is such an instrument, identical with our own, which four or five times a day, at stated intervals, reels off with mechanical monotony a list of quotations in certain active securities--the same group every day. They are limited in number, almost nobody looks at them, and many really enterprising houses do not install them at all.
Worst of all, the London broker until very recently was not properly paid for his work; he was not protected by a rigorous commission law, as we are in the New York Exchange. In New York a broker charges ⅛ per cent. commission on the par value of every hundred shares in which he deals for a non-member, each way, and the rules of the Exchange compel him to collect it in all cases. The slightest departure from this rule, however technical it may be, is severely punished, and no statute of limitations or other expedient will save him from the consequences of it. Thus all the brokers are insured an equal footing; competition for business is prevented, and the public which the Exchange seeks to serve is assured of equally fair dealing in every quarter. So rigorously is this rule enforced that the large and important branch of the Exchange’s business which has to do with joint-account trading between New York and foreign centres has recently been seriously restricted because, in the judgment of the governors, it involved an infraction of this important commission law.