On a Monday morning, especially on the Eastern Counties lines, the trains running into town have an unusually large number of passengers. They consist generally of the jolly-looking fellows who, at the time of the cattle show, take the town by storm, and fill every omnibus and cab, and dining room, and place of public amusement, and then as suddenly retire as if they were a Tartar horde, dashing into some rich and luxurious capital, then vanishing with their booty, none know whither. However, penetrate into Mark-lane, you may see them every Monday and Friday, smelling very strong of tobacco smoke—for, although smoking is absurdly and strictly prohibited on railways, it is a known fact that people will smoke nevertheless—and with the air of men who are not troubled about trifles, and have their pockets well lined with cash. These are the merchants and millers and maltsters of Mark-lane. All England waits for their reports; their decisions affect the prices of grain at Chicago on one side, and far in the ports of the Black Sea on the other. Bread is the staff of life, and its traffic affects the weal or woe of empires. Prices low in Mark-lane, and in the garrets of London, in the cellars of Manchester, in the wynds of Edinburgh, there is joy. As we may suppose, the trade in grain is one of the most ancient in the world. There were corn merchants and millers long before Mark-lane was built. Originally the corn merchants of the metropolis assembled at a place called Bark’s Quay, where now the Custom-house stands. Then they moved into Whitechapel, somewhere near Aldgate Church, and then the Corn Exchange in Mark-lane was built. Originally there was but one exchange, that erected in 1749, which is private property, and the money for which was raised in eighty hundred-pound shares; each share at this time being worth £1,300. This, I believe, is the only metropolitan market for corn, grain, and seeds. The market days are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; hours, ten to three. Wheat is paid for in bills at one month, and other corn and grain in bills at two months. The Kentish hoymen, distinguishable by their sailors’ jackets, have stands free of expense, and pay less for metage and dues than others, and the Essex dealers enjoy some privileges; in both cases said to be in consideration of the men of Kent and Essex having continued to supply the city when it was ravaged by the plague. Old Mark-lane consists of an open Doric colonnade, within which the factors have their stands. It resembles the atrium, or place of audience in the Pompeian house, with its impluvium, the place in the centre in which the rain fell. In this market, managed by a committee and secretary, there was no foreign competition. At this time there are about seventy-two stands, and more than a hundred subscribers of five guineas each. I believe the stands are from thirty to forty pounds a year. Now at one time this place was quite a close borough. There were more factors than the place could hold, and when a stand was vacant it was given to some poor broken-down man, who would not be likely to interfere with the jolly business which the rest were carrying on. The excluded were very indignant. They planted themselves in Mark-lane. They did business in the street outside the Exchange. They were men of equal standing and respectability with any of the privileged; and after an immense amount of grumbling and growling, they did as most Englishmen would have done—went to Parliament, and got an Act to have a second Exchange erected side by side with the old one. This second erection was completed in 1826, and in the partition are now a couple of arches, which were placed there in order that, if at any time the old Exchange were amalgamated with the new—a consummation of which there seems no chance at present—the whole may be formed into one capacious market. The new Exchange has a central Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by imperial arms and agricultural emblems, the ends having corresponding pilasters. Here lightermen and granary-keepers have stands as well as corn merchants, factors, and millers. At the further end of this building there is a seed-market; nor is this all. Attached to the new Exchange is an hotel, in the upper room of which is an auction room for the sale of damaged cargoes; and on the other side—that is, above the old Exchange—is a subscription refreshment room, known as Jack’s, where most of the Norfolk flour is sold, a great deal of it being paid for in ready money, and then resold again downstairs, on the usual credit, the profit on such a transaction being the odd threepence or sixpence, which becomes a respectable sum if you buy or sell a thousand quarters. Up here are the millers or their agents in large quantities. “We are not,” said one to the writer, “the rogues the world takes us for. If we don’t sell good flour, the bakers can’t sell their bread.” Let us hope this is true; but in these days of universal rascaldom, when gold, no matter how dishonestly acquired, makes its possessor an object of respect, and not of scorn, what wonder is it that we believe that there are rogues in grain as well as in other trades? In the middle of the old Exchange you will see an immense number of foreigners; these are Greeks, living all together in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, who are gradually getting all the foreign trade—what are our English merchants about?—of the country into their hands. It is the Greeks, not the English, who buy up the corn shipped from the ports of the Black Sea, and pour it into the English market. Besides these Greeks, you will see captains of vessels in great numbers waiting to hear if their cargoes are sold, and where they are to be taken. A busy scene is Mark-lane, especially on a Monday. The malt tax in 1857 was £6,470,010, which represents an enormous amount of malt, of which a great part is sold in Mark-lane. In the year 1857 there were imported into the United Kingdom 3,473,957 quarters of wheat, 1,701,470 of barley, 1,710,299 of oats, 76,048 of rye, 159,899 of peas, 305,775 of beans, 1,150,783 of Indian corn, 188 of buck-wheat, and 2,763 of bere or bigg; and in the same year there were imported 2,184,176 cwts. of flour and meal. Then we must not forget the home produce, which is principally brought into London by ships, though a great deal of it comes up by rail. In London alone the consumption of wheat in the shape of flour and otherwise may be estimated at upwards of 1,600,000 quarters a year. But Mark-lane is not, like Smithfield, a market for London alone. On the contrary, it is attended by buyers from all parts of the country. The cargoes in the river sold at Mark-lane may be landed at Leith, or Glasgow, or Liverpool, or even in the distant ports of Cork, or Belfast, or Dublin. Well may there be a bustle in Mark-lane. At eleven the market commences, and at the various stands preparations are made for the business of the day by untying and placing on the stands little bags containing samples of every conceivable species of grain eatable by man or beast. At the end of the day the floor is covered with the samples which the buyer, after rubbing over in his hands and inspecting, has thrown down. The sweepings are afterwards gathered up and sold, and realise, I believe, a very handsome sum in the course of the year. At half-past two a beadle rings a bell, and no more are permitted to enter the Exchange. Those that are there hastily finish their business, tie up their samples, swallow a chop, rush off to their respective termini, and in two or three hours are perhaps more than a hundred miles away. Mark-lane for the rest of the week is a dull, dirty lane, with but few passengers, and very dark and dull indeed.

Yet Mark-lane has its romances. Look around you; not a man perhaps but can tell you of enormous profits and enormous losses. The trade carried on here is of so speculative a character that but few realise money by it after all. Come to this stand. It was calculated the other day that the firm carrying on business here were losing at the rate of a thousand pounds per hour. Hear this factor: “I once bought some Windsor beans at an early hour in the morning at 32s. a quarter, and sold them the same day at 64s.” Yet our informant has been compelled to settle with his creditors. You may point to me a man who has not been reduced to this, but he is a rara avis, and he can tell you how, perhaps, another day or another hour would have made him a bankrupt. The rule is a crisis and a crash; not a disgraceful one—for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually—but a crisis and a temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many years, and has accumulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation scatters it all, and compels him—old, and destitute of the energy of youth—to begin business again. This is hard, but it cannot be helped. Men who have been on the Exchange long can tell you funny stories of how they came at seven in the morning and cleared handsome sums of money before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our ancestors had devised—in order that bread, the staff of life, might not be high in price—on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see if the flour is hidden there—an amiable weakness to which the mob was much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts of the old world and the new.