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, 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.

Chapter VI

The Cowperwood family was by this time established in its new and larger and more tastefully furnished house on North Front Street, facing the river.  The house was four stories tall and stood twenty-five feet on the street front, without a yard.