Meantime, brokers who are not members of the Stock Exchange--outside brokers, they are called--flood the newspapers with advertisements of a description so flaring as to rival or surpass those of the patent medicine vendors; and partly to counteract the competition thus arising, the Committee of the Stock Exchange has a standing advertisement in all the principal papers announcing that members of the Stock Exchange are not allowed to advertise, that those who do advertise are not members of the Stock Exchange, and that lists of those members who are brokers--it is no use furnishing the public with the names of the jobbers--may be obtained from the Secretary on application. A list may also be seen at one of the entrances of the Bank of England--a relic, perhaps, of the time, when the Rotunda of the Bank of England was practically a Stock Exchange. There are a few firms of outside brokers of the highest standing, possessing businesses superior in magnitude and status to those of the great majority of Stock Exchange firms. Such firms as these in former years brought a considerable volume of business to the Stock Exchange itself, obtaining orders from their clients by more enterprising methods than the members themselves were permitted to employ under their rules, and passing the business on to brokers who were members. In its stringent rules regarding brokers' commissions, however, the Stock Exchange Committee has now practically abolished this practice by specifically penalising outside brokers.
All outside brokers, of course, are unchecked by the healthful restraining control of the Stock Exchange Committee; they are responsible to none but themselves. Their ranks unfortunately contain a large number of rogues and vagabonds. As they deal direct with their clients instead of for them, their clients' losses are their own gains; often they do not deal at all, but only bet with their clients on the rise or fall of prices. When they lose they refuse to pay, and on being taken into Court plead the Gambling Acts to relieve them of their liability. Cases are constantly occurring in which they show less honesty even than this; they simply make off with any money with which people may have entrusted them. As a rule, the advertising outside broker is to be avoided.