in 1779, at Lloyd's Coffee House. A policy taken
out on the _Tiger_ immortalized by Shakespeare would serve as a model
still. And what makes it all the more interesting is that the
Elizabethan underwriters calculated the _Tiger's_ chances at the very
spot where the association known as Lloyd's transacts its business
to-day, the Royal Exchange in London. This, in turn, brings Elizabeth
herself upon the scene; for when she visited the Exchange, which Sir
Thomas Gresham had built to let the merchants do their street work under
cover, she immediately grasped its full significance and 'caused it by
an Herald and a Trumpet to be proclaimed The Royal Exchange,' the name
it bears to-day. An Elizabethan might well be astonished by what he
would see at any modern Lloyd's. Yet he would find the same essentials;
for the British Lloyd's, like most of its foreign imitators, is not a
gigantic insurance company at all, but an association of cautiously
elected members who carry on their completely independent private
business in daily touch with each other--precisely as Elizabethans did.
Lloyd's method differs wholly from ordinary insurance. Instead of
insuring vessel and cargo with a single company or man the owner puts
his case before Lloyd's, and any member can then write his name
underneath for any reasonable part of the risk. The modern
'underwriter,' all the world over, is the direct descendant of the
Elizabethan who wrote his name under the conditions of a given risk at
sea.

Joint-stock companies were in one sense old when Elizabethan men of
business were young. But the Elizabethans developed them enormously.
'Going shares' was doubtless prehistoric. It certainly was ancient,
medieval, and Elizabethan. But those who formerly went shares generally
knew each other and something of the business too. The favorite number
of total shares was just sixteen. There were sixteen land-shares in a
Celtic household, sixteen shares in Scottish vessels not individually
owned, sixteen shares in the theatre by which Shakespeare 'made his
pile.' But sixteenths, and even hundredths, were put out of date when
speculation on the grander scale began and the area of investment grew.
The New River Company, for supplying London with water, had only a few
shares then, as it continued to have down to our own day, when they
stood at over a thousand times par. The Ulster 'Plantation' in Ireland
was more remote and appealed to more investors and on wider
gro