If you should suffer yourself to be trick'd out of any Bills, he will contrive, in some way or other, to negotiate them--not, as he professes, for you, but for himself and his colleagues; and, very likely, after you have been at the additional expense of commencing a suit at law against them, they have disappeared, and are in the King's Bench or the Fleet, waiting there to defraud you of every hope and expectation, by obtaining their liberty through the White-washing Act.
"These gentry are for the most part Attorneys or Pettifoggers, or closely connected with such; and notwithstanding all legal provisions to preclude them from exacting large sums, either for their agency and introduction, or for the bonds which they draw, yet they contrive to bring themselves home, and escape detection, by some such means as the following: "They pretend that it is necessary to have a deed drawn up to explain the uses of the Annuity-bond, which the grantor of the money, who is some usurious villain, immediately acknowledges and accedes to; for "The bond that signs the mortgage pays the shot; so that an Act which is fraught with the best purposes for the protection of the honest, but unfortunate, is in this manner subjected to the grossest chicanery of pettifoggers and pretenders, and the vilest evasions of quirking low villains of the law.
"There is also another species of money-lender, not inaptly termed the Female Banker.

These accommodate Barrow-women and others, who sell fruit, vegetables, &c.

in the public streets, with five shillings a day (the usual diurnal stock in such cases;) for the use of which for twelve hours they obtain the moderate premium of sixpence when the money is returned in the evening, receiving at this rate about seven pounds ten shillings per year for every five pounds they can so employ.

It is however very difficult to convince the borrowers of the correctness of this calculation, and of the serious loss to which they subject themselves by a continuation of the system, since it is evident that this improvident and dissolute class of people have no other idea than that of making the day and the way alike long.

Their profits ~172~~( often considerably augmented by dealing in base money as well as the articles which they sell) seldom last over the day; for they never fail to have a luxurious dinner and a hot supper, with a plentiful supply of gin and porter: looking in general no farther than to keep the whole original stock with the sixpence interest, which is paid over to the female Banker in the evening, and a new loan obtained on the following morning to go to market, and to be disposed of in the same way.
"In contemplating this curious system of banking, or money lending (trifling as it may appear,) it is almost impossible not to be forcibly struck with the immense profits that are derived from it.