The Financier a novel by Theodore Dreiser

particular ones that he knew about—would be paid. 
What was more, the money system of the United States was only then 
beginning slowly to emerge from something approximating chaos to 
something more nearly approaching order. The United States Bank, of which 
Nicholas Biddle was the progenitor, had gone completely in 1841, and the 
United States Treasury with its subtreasury system had come in 1846; but 
still there were many, many wildcat banks, sufficient in number to make the 
average exchange-counter broker a walking encyclopedia of solvent and 
insolvent institutions. Still, things were slowly improving, for the telegraph 
had facilitated stock-market quotations, not only between New York, Boston, 

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and Philadelphia, but between a local broker's office in Philadelphia and his 
stock exchange. In other words, the short private wire had been introduced. 
Communication was quicker and freer, and daily grew better. 
Railroads had been built to the South, East, North, and West. There was as 
yet no stock-ticker and no telephone, and the clearing-house had only 
recently been thought of in New York, and had not yet been introduced in 
Philadelphia. Instead of a clearing-house service, messengers ran daily 
between banks and brokerage firms, balancing accounts on pass-books, 
exchanging bills, and, once a week, transferring the gold coin, which was 
the only thing that could be accepted for balances due, since there was no 
stable national currency. "On 'change," when the gong struck announcing 
the close of the day's business, a company of young men, known as 
"settlement clerks," after a system borrowed from London, gathered in the 
center of the room and compared or gathered the various trades of the day 
in a ring, thus eliminating all those sales and resales between certain firms 
which naturally canceled each other. They carried long account books, and 
called out the transactions—"Delaware and Maryland sold to Beaumont and 
Company," "Delware and Maryland sold to Tighe and Company," and so on. 
This simplified the bookkeeping of the various firms, and made for quicker 
and more stirring commercial transactions. 
Seats "on 'change" sold for two thousand dollars each. The members of the 
exchange had just passed rules limiting the trading to the hours between 
ten and three (before this they had been any time between morning and 
midnight), and had fixed the rates at which brokers could do business, in 
the face of cut-throat schemes which had previously held. Severe penalties 
were fixed for those who failed to obey. In other words, things were shaping 
up for a great 'change business, and Edward Tighe felt, with other brokers, 
that there was a great future ahead.