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Saldaña Zorrilla
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Supply Chain Resilience Reducing Vulnerability to Economic Shocks Financial Crises and Natural Disasters
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Abstract
The increasing frequency and economic losses from natural disasters within the framework of decreasing agricultural prices and trade liberalization is becoming crucial in increasing poverty in the Mexican rural economy. During the past two decades, the governmental withdrawal from supporting the agricultural sector with investments in physical, financial and logistic instruments continues to stress agricultural livelihoods, as current private mechanisms have not replaced them effectively. It has contributed to making the agricultural sector particularly vulnerable to a number of hazards as it has weakened economic agents’ response and impeded assets accumulation. This book identifies economic vulnerability to natural and economic hazards in order to assess public and private coping capacity, and provides a conceptual framework and economic theory that supports the overall approach and employed methodologies. It is based on quantitative and qualitative research methods, and makes use of econometric analysis and stakeholders’ views aimed at finding feasible solutions. Further, this book offers a spatial model that can support policy-decision-making for the creation of differential investments in productive infrastructure, as well as financial instruments to reduce current vulnerability and poverty throughout the national territory.
During the past three decades, over 80% of total economic losses from weatherrelated disasters occurred in the agricultural sector. In the same period, mean weighted agricultural prices have decreased over 50% in real terms, and since 1996 a trade deficit has persisted in this sector. Currently, insufficient credit access, low coverage of crop insurance, as well as a near lack of investments to expand irrigation and further productive infrastructure, is sharpening the vulnerability of rural livelihoods. These facts explain why this sector produces only 4% of the GDP despite employing over 20% of the national workforce. These facts undermine farmers’ expectations of future incomes within the community, stimulating ruralurban out migration, which usually cannot be absorbed by the urban economy in light of the modest industrial dynamism of recent years. This leads to enlargement of informal sectors in large cities and migratory flows to abroad, among others.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the following persons and institutions for contributing to the success of this book. Above all, special thanks to Dr. Joanne Linerooth-Bayer, Program Leader of the Risk and Vulnerability Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), who continually supported this work. Valuable criticism and suggestions from the following people have been decisive in writing this book: Dr. Reinhard Mechler, Dr. Uwe Schubert, Dr. Krister Sandberg, Dr. Neal Leary, Dr. Larry Willmore and Dr. Jose M. Albala-Bertrand.
Particularly valuable was the encouragement obtained from the World Bank and the Provention Consortium, as well as from the START-IIASA Advanced Institute on Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change, which financed the various country consultations.
4.6.1
6.6
6.7
Chapter 1 Introduction
Along with economic and institutional stressors, the occurrence of natural disasters is increasingly determining income and asset accumulation of a vulnerable population in Mexico. This book identifies and estimates the effect of natural hazards, along with some economic variables, on poverty, as well as assesses the impact of current public and private strategies aimed at reducing economic vulnerability. Most of the workforce living in poverty in rural areas relies on agricultural livelihoods and they are increasingly affected by weather-related disasters. Insufficient physical and financial instruments to hedge the agricultural sector both from weather- and market-related risks contribute to the weakening response of farmers, the negative consequences of which expand to other regions.
During the period 1980-2013, over 80% of total damages from weather-related events affected the agricultural sector in Mexico. Though the contribution of the agricultural sector is only around 3% of GDP, it is the livelihood of nearly 20% of the national population. Trade liberalization, in Mexico since the mid-1980s, has not only resulted in a negligible increase in production, but also contributed to an increase of uncertainty with regards to small farm incomes, with a rise in imports and depressed prices of agricultural products.
This book recognizes that natural disasters and trade liberalization are not the only factors contributing to poverty in this country; however, it aims to prove that they are becoming economically crucial in maintaining and increasing structural poverty with their disruptive effect on the asset accumulation process. As confirmed in this book’s analysis, it drives small-scale farmers out of business, and increases out migration from rural areas. The purpose of this analysis is to examine how natural disasters and adverse economic conditions affect agricultural livelihoods and the implications of these stressors upon the poor in the agricultural sector, in order to come up with suggestions to reduce their vulnerability. Special emphasis is given to the effects of these hazards on migration patterns. In addition, this project analyzes selected policy options (e.g. government-supported insurance schemes) to reduce the vulnerability of farmers. To further this aim, this work makes use of descriptive and econometric analyses, as well as stakeholders’ interviews.
S.O. Saldaña-Zorrilla, Natural Disasters, Foreign Trade and Agriculture in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17359-7_1
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During the past three decades, the rising amount of research work, particularly in the natural sciences, has contained warnings about the increasing pressure of natural hazards on human societies. So far, the economic sciences have given little attention to these studies. This book presents an integral analysis of both natural and economic hazards as determinants of poverty and labor mobility, embracing social and policy aspects. The methodology includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. A review of existing economic and policy literature is presented mainly in Chapters 2 and 4, which discuss evidence supporting this book’s hypothesis and describe the process behind economic vulnerability in Mexico. Chapter 5 is based on a spatial econometrics analysis of data from the 2,443 municipalities of Mexico as well as on a survey of farmers and further stakeholders. Data was gathered from a number of sources, including national and international organizations, as well as those collected directly from households and policymakers during the survey and country consultations carried out in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2014. This analysis quantitatively validates the hypotheses presented in this text.
The conceptual framework of this book, presented in Chapter 2, is based on the vast existing literature from both the natural and social sciences. It describes the basic mechanisms by which vulnerable societies tend to amplify the negative consequences of natural disasters, given their usual weak coping and adaptive capacity. Coping capacity, as discussed, is in turn conditioned not only by natural hazards and market imperfections, but also a result of the original endowment modified by the historic process of wealth distribution, giving shape to the current entitlement system. In addition, the inherent capacity of economic agents to adapt their structure and functioning in response to harmful events is closely conditioned by existing institutions. Given the prevailing high levels of poverty and vulnerability in Mexico, as discussed in Chapter 2, the current public intervention to strengthen coping and adaptive capacity of the exposed population is being exceeded
Considering the increasing tendency of frequent and severe natural disasters and the economic losses associated with them, together with the dropping agricultural prices presented in Chapter 3, this research warns of the most likely forthcoming increase in poverty if no effective strategy has been implemented to reduce vulnerability. As the urban economy has experienced a very modest growth during the last three decades, it is unable to absorb the additional workforce released from rural areas. It has led to the proliferation of slums and to a currently fast growing informal urban economy. As both the uncertain agricultural incomes and the precarious urban jobs do not fulfill the expectation of the vulnerable population, increasing emigration to the USA is the usual response, particularly in the case of farmers living in remote regions. This trend is further verified both by the stakeholders’ survey and the spatial model.
Chapter 4 assesses current policy instruments for reducing agricultural vulnerability, identifying areas where public investments in productive infrastructure can greatly achieve progress in poverty reduction if combined with disaster mitigation works and expanding public-private insurance schemes. In addition, it analyzes possible improvements to policies and instruments for reducing economic losses, e.g., subsidized micro-insurance, and for reducing poverty and vulnerability in the
agricultural sector. In light of the current comparatively low implementation of exante instruments, this chapter underlines the need for a more active promotion of existing disaster mitigation instruments (e.g. funds for mitigation works) from the federal authority along with more participative action from the community and municipal authorities to propose projects. This chapter’s research is based to a large extent on a project the author carried out in 2003 for the World Bank and the Prevention Consortium (Saldaña-Zorrilla 2004), which was complemented by a consultation with policymakers in Mexico between 2004 and 2014, a policy assessment report prepared for the United Nations (Saldaña-Zorrilla 2007) and a stakeholders’ assessment carried out in 2014.
The great human and geophysical diversity of Mexico is reflected in its existing plurality of economic practices and natural hazards exposure. Chapter 5 applies spatial econometric analyses to assess the importance of natural disasters and depressed prices due to imports (or to simple low international prices), and analyzes their differential interaction with the diminishing income of vulnerable regions to stimulate out migration from municipalities highly exposed to natural hazards. During the past two decades, failure to implement effective mechanisms for reducing risk to climatic and market variability is impeding accumulating enough physical and human assets in, particularly, the agricultural sector. The negative effects of hazards in vulnerable regions have a spillover effect on neighboring regions. For that reason, direct public intervention is needed to allow asset accumulation. Derived from the migration model, one can observe that a segment more prone to emigrate is one that with greater reductions in real incomes and more frequently affected by disasters. It reveals the role of expectations of future incomes in the configuration of migratory flows.
The current role of the government, the private market (e.g., insurers), the farmers and other stakeholders in dealing with adverse outcomes from natural disasters and income uncertainty of small-scale farmers are still insufficiently interconnected, as verified by the views of the stakeholders presented in Chapter 6. This chapter identifies the problem of farmer vulnerability to natural disasters and trade liberalization, and examines the preferred policy responses from the point of view of stakeholders, including farmers, farmer cooperatives, crop insurers, and ministries and departments of local and national governments. A dramatic governmental withdrawal of the previous two decades from supporting the agricultural sector with facilities for production and commercialization continues putting stress on rural livelihoods as no effective compensatory mechanisms have been successfully implemented. This fieldwork identified a clear need for a more profit-oriented production and expansion of coverage of individual and collective financing instruments to face external shocks. The chapter is derived from research the author conducted between 2004 and 2005 as part of a project for the START-IIASA Advanced Institute of Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change (SaldañaZorrilla 2006) as well as on field work carried out in 2014 in order to elaborate the 10 years follow-up.
Chapter 7 integrates the results of all chapters to provide some wrapping-up remarks and presents a final discussion to guide future directions.
This book’s analyses contribute to the current debate of the long-term economic impact of disasters, as well as offer an integral methodology combining natural and social sciences for further studies of country and community level vulnerability to climate change. The lessons derived from this analysis provide useful elements for the design and improvement of governmental policies concerning social and economic development as well. In addition, the desegregation of this analysis has the advantage of facilitating the design and evaluation of governmental projects at municipal, sub-national and national level, as well as provides conceptual-empirical elements for international cooperation in matters of disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, rural development and poverty reduction.
Introduction References
Saldaña-Zorrilla SO (2007) Socio-Economic Vulnerability to Natural Disasters in Mexico: rural poor, trade and public response. CEPAL/ECLAC-Economic Commission for Latin-American and Caribbean Countries. United Nations, Mexico City
Saldaña-Zorrilla SO (2006) Views in Reducing Rural Vulnerability to Natural Disasters in Southern Mexico: Hazard Exposure, Coping and Adaptive Capacity. Working paper of the Advanced Institute of Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change. START-IIASA, Washington, DC
Saldaña-Zorrilla SO (2004) Mexican agriculture and its vulnerability to natural disasters and trade. In: Lessons Learned from Natural Disasters Management in Developing Countries (compendium). The World Bank. Washington, DC
Chapter 2 A conceptual framework of economic vulnerability
… Una historia que toma sentido a partir de la conciencia de marginalidad
LEOPOLDO
ZEA, Filosofía de la historia americana
Abstract This introductory chapter is devoted to presenting the conceptual framework of economic vulnerability and its drivers, as well as analyzes the role of natural disasters in reducing assets accumulation and the derived regional development implications. It provides the background to understand the dynamic of economic vulnerability first in general and further concretely in Mexico. This chapter quotes a number of research works relevant to provide elements for a solid discussion on the original endowment in defining current social asymmetries, poverty and agricultural productivity in Mexico, coming up with an objective view of the problematic, and a grounded argumentation of this work’s hypothesis.
The chapter starts by providing a review of different concepts and approaches of vulnerability (Section 2.1) and economic vulnerability (Section 2.2) towards defining this work’s concept of economic vulnerability. Further, we approach and briefly illustrate the structure of economic vulnerability and its functioning as a dynamic and cyclic process. One interpretation of the complex process of multiple interacting drivers of economic vulnerability is expounded in Section 2.3, emphasizing the role of assets, especially those of the poor in rural areas. This section also discusses poverty definitions, assesses briefly poverty in Mexico, and provides some elements towards explaining historic facts defining entitlements and some issues of economic policy behind poverty in Mexico and concretely in the countryside. The need for taking into account concepts and patterns of agricultural growth and rural-urban migration in a strategy to deal with economic vulnerability is presented in Section 2.4. External shocks tend to become amplified due to structural weakness and interacting stressors that are explicitly described within this chapter and summed
S.O. Saldaña-Zorrilla, Natural Disasters, Foreign Trade and Agriculture in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17359-7_2
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up further below. We then, in the forthcoming chapters of this research work, leave the mere conceptual discussion and proceed to assessment of vulnerability and public-private response in Mexico, along with its possible solution paths.
2.1 Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the key concept to our approach, and we proceed now to expound definitions of vulnerability from different disciplines and perspectives relevant to the present work, their linkages to related concepts and, based on them, to propose a definition of economic vulnerability.
In a broad sense, vulnerability is incumbent upon two sides: unit of exposure and external force(s). So, vulnerability can be initially defined as the susceptibility of a certain unit to a specific force, and risk can be expressed as the probability of an undesired derived outcome, based on the potential occurrence of harmful events and on the susceptibility to them among those likely to be exposed (Dilley and Boudreau 2001).
The way sustainability science analyzes both elements included in these sides, as well as the complexity of their interrelations, provides an excellent basis towards defining, further, economic vulnerability. So, for some scholars of sustainability science, vulnerability is conceived, above all, as a coupled human-environment systems interaction, which possesses a likelihood to experience harm due to exposure to a hazard (Turner et al 2003).1
So, vulnerability does not involve merely active and passive factors, but rather dynamic objects and subjects in continuous motion. As pointed out in Turner et al (2003), systems have different sensitivities to perturbations and stressors strongly linked to entitlements in the case of social units.2
Along with entitlements, other elements defining susceptibility of social units are coping and adaptive capacity. Coping capacity can be defined as the ability of a unit to respond to a harm occurrence as well as to avoid its potential affectation. Adaptive capacity is the ability of a unit to gradually transform its structure, functioning or organization to survive under hazards threatening its existence (Kelly and Adger 2000). Another concept contributing to vulnerability comprehension is resilience, which, borrowed from physics, defines a system’s ability to return to a reference state after a disturbance and to maintain basic structures and functions despite disturbance (Norris et al 2008; Turner et al. 2003). Thus, the expounded linked
1 In this concept, hazards are understood as threats to the system, which act by means of perturbations and stressors. Perturbation is a major alteration in the system -of external origin- generating exceeding effects to those the system can cope with, and stress is a continuous increasing pressure upon the system. The novelty of this concept is that it expands the analysis spectrum to embrace multiple stressors and the structure of a hazard’s causal sequence as a complex of socioeconomic conditions and biophysical subsystems lying behind.
2 Entitlements are essentially the system of legal and customary rights defining access to society’s resources.
concepts obligate us to incorporate social, economic, institutional, and cultural structures into the set of forces shaping a units’ susceptibility in the vulnerability analysis, thus overcoming the eventual limitations of other frameworks, i.e. riskhazard and pressure-and-release models.3 Moreover, these concepts will be useful to the present work, since their implementation into our analysis may allow us to maneuver with existing structures in the country with which our case of study deals, especially in the part concerning decision making.
Vulnerability analysis is increasingly being applied to different concrete matters using implicitly most of the above listed elements of vulnerability, but emphasizing the concrete area they deal with. For instance, some works focused on human health vulnerability emphasize the lack of post-floods management in dengue outbreaks (Zapata-Martí and Saldaña-Zorrilla 2009); Works focused on concrete biophysical dimensions of vulnerability, i.e. water, emphasize, for instance, inadequate supplies of potable water and sanitation, and exposure to waterborne diseases of a given human settlement (Cocklin 2002); Works on vulnerability to climate change underline the contribution of natural disasters mismanagement to increase vulnerability of human systems to natural hazards (Conde and Saldaña-Zorrilla 2008; Abramowitz et al. 2002); Other works on food security emphasize shortages in food supply due to extreme events (Liverman 1990). Approaches such as dynamic vulnerability focus on, i.e., the extent to which environmental and economic changes modify the capacity of regions, sectors, ecosystems and social groups to respond to shocks (Leichenko and O’Brien 2001).
2.2 Economic vulnerability
The rise of literature on vulnerability issues over the last two decades has demanded a more specialized definition of vulnerability. For instance, social vulnerability conceives social entities as its units of analysis, aiming concretely at identifying the way human societies and individuals are prone to suffer from disturbances and stresses (Adger 1999). So, social vulnerability, as expounded above, relies to a large extent on concepts like endowments and entitlements.
For its part, economic vulnerability is still sparsely defined, and one can find concepts which, though useful and valid, fail in describing vulnerability in its wide spectrum. There exist interesting views about economic vulnerability highly biased to the side of drivers, like those provided by some scholars of political economics in the context of international development. The germinal works on this matters of
3 Risk-hazard models tend to consider impacts of hazards as a function of exposure to the hazard event and the sensitivity of the unit without clarifying how the units amplify or attenuate the impacts, as well as the role of multiple stressors in defining susceptibility. In the case of pressureand-release models (PAR), they emphasize the conditionings of a given unit’s lack of safety, including even ethnicity, class, etc. However, the PAR model does not incorporate biophysical subsystems interacting with society. 2.2
Todaro (1982) consider vulnerability as a situation in which least developed countries (LDC) find themselves in a dominance and dependence relationship vis-àvis the developed countries. In this concrete view, LDCs are said to be economically vulnerable to the decisions of rich nations in areas such as trade, private foreign investments, foreign aid, technological research and development, etc.4
In line with Todaro’s definition, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) defines economic vulnerability as the structurally more exposed position of LDCs than most other developing countries to external economic shocks. Also, UNCTAD points out that economic vulnerability implies consequences of major global and regional economic and financial disturbances and increases in the prices of critical imports such as energy products; The typical export dominance of a single commodity or service sector makes their economies particularly vulnerable to adverse physical or economic shocks (UNCTAD 2003).
So, in the early 1990s, UNCTAD developed a first attempt to construct an index of economic vulnerability5, and in 1994 the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) adopted an index of economic vulnerability, expected to demonstrate that SIDS were generally more vulnerable than other developing countries.6
In the view of Briguglio (2002), a country can be economically vulnerable and yet register a relatively high GDP per capita. So, countries like the SIDS are particularly economically vulnerable due to their limited ability to exploit economies of scale, lack of natural resources, low diversified economy, dependence on narrow range of exports, and high dependence on imports of strategic goods, i.e. fuel and food. Notwithstanding, what essentially makes a country economically vulnerable in the definition of Briguglio, is its exposure to economic forces outside its control. Thus, the peripherality condition of an economy goes beyond geographic insularity and remoteness (leading to high costs and marginalization from world trade), but also includes inability to influence international prices (price-taker economies).
However, being vulnerable is not only a question of poverty and smallness of a country, as this work approaches. Vulnerability accrues also to countries of big population and large economies, whose vulnerabilities are less visible at a glance, and only through more detailed analysis exhibit differential vulnerabilities due to dualistic characteristics (Rodríguez 1980). So, above all, Latin American countries
4 This is a useful concept whose asymmetry component is closely interconnected with other concepts from the economics of development, like the center-periphery relations and terms of trade in the works of Raúl Prebisch (i.e. 1950 and 1973, respectively).
5 Cfr. Briguglio, L. (1992). Preliminary study on the construction of an Index for ranking countries according to their economic vulnerability. Report to UNCTAD, 1992.
6 The UNCTAD Economic Vulnerability Index was constructed as a composite indicator based on three fundamental dimensions: (1) the magnitude of external shocks beyond domestic control (measured through indicators of the instability of agricultural production and exports); (2) the exposure of the economy to these shocks (estimated through the share of manufacturing and modern services in the gross domestic product, and an indicator of merchandise export concentration), and; (3) the structural handicaps explaining the high exposure of the economy (taking into account economy’s smallness, measured by a proxy demographic variable) -UNCTAD 2003. 2
like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina should not be considered as entirely vulnerable, but unequally vulnerable, whose rich and poor societies, high productive and leftbehind economic sectors, etc. coexist at differential degrees of vulnerability (Rodríguez 1980; Colosio-Murrieta 1979).
More recently, economic vulnerability is being used to refer to the extent to which macroeconomic policies can exhibit performance inconsistencies, sudden loss of net national product, and hence lead to economic crises, as a result of underscored development of warning systems and an economy’s inability to work with multiple equilibria (Yap 2002). The response to these types of vulnerabilities can consist of financial monitoring and modeling of early warning systems, as Kaminsky and Reinhart (1996) propose to concretely avoid economic crises originated in financial factors like the Asian one of 1997. However, these approaches do not address structural factors of the economy, and tend to reflect rather what this work calls risk and preparedness, instead of vulnerability and vulnerability reduction, respectively.
2.2.1 Coping and adaptive capacity
In defining economic vulnerability it is crucial to consider approaches with imbedded structural factors. So, the implications of vulnerability to economic analysis are explicitly expounded by Amartya Sen (1981) by relating entitlements and initial endowment in a coherent process where individual levels of vulnerability are conditioned by broader institutional structures, which sometimes reproduce or even amplify vulnerability given society’s capacity to provide opportunities. These views and concepts are inserted below both in our immediate concept of economic vulnerability as well as in further details in Section 2.3. Now, let us explain the concrete elements constituting coping and adaptive capacity in economic vulnerability.
I. Coping capacity
The capacity to respond to a harmful event as well as to avoid its potential affectation of an economic agent is not only determined by its productive level, but also by its relative position within its society. Factors like entitlements, information availability and assets distribution in a society gives shape to this coping capacity.
i) Entitlements. Connected with this way of seeing vulnerability from the perspective of economic agents, Amartya Sen (1981) addresses vulnerability using entitlements. Entitlements are the package of goods and services, which an economic agent can obtain by means of trading their stakes under current regulatory conditions. In other words, there exists an intrinsic susceptibility in the way economic agents profit from their assets.7 In addition, entitlements also influence information availability, which plays a key role concerning economic vulnerability, since the common assumption of homogeneity of information
7 With a very similar meaning, Cannon (1994: 19) calls this vulnerability of livelihood resilience.
2 A conceptual framework of economic vulnerability
among economic agents (as in the neoclassic approach of economics) does not usually apply in practice. Heterogeneity with respect to information possession makes considerable differences when taking decisions and in turn when obtaining incomes. Better informed economic agents are normally more able to identify the risk their asset implies and hence to take better decisions.
ii) Assets. Assets are a key variable to understand impoverishment in poor rural families (or households), which can be defined as the stock of wealth used to generate well being (Vatsa and Krimgold 2000). This concept is important when considering the effects of natural disasters, which can decrease the capital assets of households and businesses. Families have an initial asset, which generates an output. This output varies widely, depending on market price of the produced factor, and on the productivity of its use (profitability). As families pursue strategies to maximize their assets, they are in better position to enlarge their risk pool and reduce vulnerability.
II. Adaptive capacity
The ability of a unit to gradually transform its structure and/or functioning to survive hazards affectation is interconnected with assets and entitlements as well in that it influences economic agents’ ability to hedge from adverse events. Explicitly, adaptive capacity concerning economic vulnerability includes risk management and protection actions.
i) Risk management. Derived from options to deal with negative shocks, prevailing risk management capacity in a country is crucial in reducing vulnerability. Risk management is the set of pre- and post-disasters actions towards facing negative consequences of hazards (Freeman and Mechler 2001). Predisaster actions include risk transfer (i.e. insurance), risk assessment (monitoring, mapping, etc.), mitigation works (i.e. infrastructure strengthening, etc.), and preparedness. Post-disaster actions include emergency response (aid, clean-up, etc.), rehabilitation, rebuilding, and loss sharing (i.e. privatepublic, national-local).
ii) Protection. On its part, protection is a concept situated at both sides of risk management phases (pre- and post-disaster). Protection is the network of awareness and emergency response for disaster and crisis state avoidance, initially based on various technical interventions usually known as preparedness.8
In concordance with the conceptual discussion above expounded and attempting to overcome dispersion and partiality of available definitions of economic vulnerability, this work defines economic vulnerability as the susceptibility of an economic agent to absorb external shocks (hazards) negatively, given its assets possession and
8 Preparedness is the management capability before a disaster occurs to provide an effective and efficient (prompt and due) reaction to face a disaster (Freeman et al 2002). Protection granted by governmental planning plus those from other social institutions are termed social protection, which acts complementary to self-protection (Cannon 1994).
entitlements system (coping capacity), as well as its implemented risk management and protection measures (adaptive capacity). Finally, reducing economic vulnerability consists basically of implementing the due changes in time to minimize negative effects from exogenous shocks upon economic agents’ assets by strengthening contractual elements in the society (entitlements and assets) and/or improving the risk management and protection strategies.
2.2.2 The cycle of economic vulnerability
Figure 2.1 below provides a very simple illustration of, first, the structure of economic vulnerability according to this work’s approach, as well as of some elemental cause-effect relations derived from hazard occurrence. An individual unit of analysis’ vulnerability is depicted in the diagram by three fundamental elements: Unit adaptability, public response, and probability of economic losses. Unit adaptability embraces coping and adapting capacity within the framework of society’s prevailing entitlements and assets distribution.9 The second pillar of economic vulnerability is public protection, understood as the set of social programs, antipoverty strategy, etc., constituting a social and redistributive policy, as well as the public mechanism of disasters avoidance, whose strength or weakness degree contributes to define economic vulnerability of both our unit of analysis as well as to the entire society –elements of risk management are marked with an asterisk in the diagram.
The share of assets at risk –out of units’ assets total value- defines the probability of economic losses. Assets at risk are the monetary valuable elements, i.e. capital stock, production of goods and services, and in general any form of assessable wealth, exposed to hazards to a given extent. Economic Vulnerability is the outcome of these factors together. To this extent of the diagram, all said elements are potential facts, which materialize until a hazard hits the system.
The hazard causes damages that are translatable into economic monetary losses, whose implications can be direct damages, like loss of public and private productive infrastructure, housing, etc. Also, such a loss of assets leads to indirect losses,10 to productive disruption and, therefore, to decreasing incomes of private economic agents. The government, for its part, may decrease revenue from state-owned companies as well as because of decreased taxing basis (concerning basically income and consumption taxes) as a consequence of a potential reduction in economic activity. This process produces a vicious cycle as less income leads to less financial
9 In fact, adaptability is the preferred term for this work though that word itself could seem to misrepresent its components, and perhaps could be better represented by terms like resistance, strength, etc. However, most literature of vulnerability uses it conventionally to represent system’s ability, competency or capacity of a system to adapt and respond to climatic stimuli. Also, see Schjolden (2003), Kelly and Adger (2000), and Chambers (1989).
10 Indirect losses are actually the share of unrealized production, which act by reducing GDP growth in the current year, whereas direct losses are not accounted into GDP growth reductions, since they are added value belonging to GDP accounting of past years (cfr. ECLAC 2002).
Indirect losses (productive disruption)
Less economic activity
Less tax revenue
Less public resources to reduce economy’s vulnerability
Less unit’s income
2 A conceptual framework of economic vulnerability
Economic loss
Less resources to reduce unit’s vulnerability
Perturbations
Stresses
Hazard occurrance
Economic Vulnerability
A. Unit Adaptability
C. Probability of economic losses
Direct losses (public infrastructure, housing etc.)
Rebuilding, repairing, relief to the poor, etc.(*)
Assets at risk
B. Public Protection
Coping capacity
Adaptive capacity
Unit’s risk financial options (insurance, risk pool, etc.) (*)
Public financial options (risk-sharing, transfer, and mitigation) (*)
(*) Risk Management elements
Fig. 2.1 The structure of economic vulnerability and its cycle
ability to invest in reducing vulnerability both at unit level, i.e. household, as well as at global level, i.e. economy, in reducing vulnerability. Unlike perturbations, stresses are linked to the unit’s resistance (discontinuous line) because, as above expounded, they are understood as threats to the system, which act by means of continuous increasing pressure upon the system, and are associated to a large extent to structural conditions. Appendix A provides further elements to analyze the dynamic of economic vulnerability, suggesting a mechanism to maneuver with coping and adaptive strategies in order to reduce economic vulnerability under this work’s framework.
2.3
Drivers of economic vulnerability
So far, the basic elements shaping economic vulnerability have been presented here, and we turn now to explain the relevance of the hazards analyzed in the following chapters of this book (natural disasters and trade liberalization). Considering that hazards are threats to the system, which act by means of perturbations and stressors, analyzing assets structure and their functioning along with the historic impact of the entitlements in this country is crucial to clarify why natural hazards and economic policy have been drivers of increasing vulnerability in Mexico.
2.3.1 Assets accumulation
Increasingly, scholars argue that poverty is not only a lack of income or consumption, but also a lack of assets (Haveman and Wolff 2000; Oliver and Shapiro 1990; Sherraden 1991). So, asset poor involve those households with insufficient resources to invest in their future or to sustain household members at a basic level during an economic disruption (Fisher and Weber 2004). There exists empirical evidence showing that wealth is more unequally distributed than income. For instance, Wolff (2001) points out that the top 20 percent of households in the USA earn 56 per cent of the nation’s income and own 83 percent of national wealth. For that reason it is crucial to identify poor households’ assets in order to, further, encourage assets accumulation.
Among other authors, Chambers (1989) cautions about the relevance of increasing assets in low-income families, since this improves human conditions beyond poverty just in terms of flows, but also structural vulnerability. He affirms that vulnerability is even more interlinked with net assets than poverty. For authors like Vatsa and Krimgold (2000), vulnerability is a broader and more dynamic concept, which involves the poor, but also households living above the poverty line at risk of falling below in case of an income shock (new poor). Given that linkage, factors that obstruct an accumulation of assets are, in turn, impeding poverty reduction and putting additional population into poverty. For instance, losses from natural disasters or income reductions due to depressed agricultural prices impede rural households in accumulating assets, creating a vicious cycle of inefficient risk management strategy, low return, low consumption and low savings and investment (Vatsa and Krimgold 2000).
A poverty reduction strategy possesses two sides. One consisting of irreducible actions aimed at providing short-term relief to families living in poverty (i.e. health facilities) and making affordable some long-term intangible assets (i.e. education). The other side is related rather to directly strengthen income generation, i.e. agricultural commercialization, reducing information asymmetries, productivity enforcement, etc. However, the latter side of the anti-poverty strategy in Mexico –as in most of the countries- is less actively promoted (Fisher and Weber 2004; ECLAC 2001;
2 A conceptual framework of
Attanasio and Szekely 1999). It is so partly because it implies actions falling outside the jurisdiction of mere poverty-related governmental agencies. It is so also because strengthening income generation is more complex and usually requires changes to the national socioeconomic structure and lot of political lobbying and willingness. Programs aimed at reducing poverty tend to increase transfers, but they do not affect the long-term lack of assets in the current case of Mexico (Attanasio and Szekely 1999). Anti-poverty programs help to raise income or consumption but only in terms of flows. In addition, ECLAC (2001, p. 32) points out that social programs of poverty reduction in Mexico are merely of aid character, though if these programs were more substantial and long-term sustained, these additional resources could increase assets, as well as for instance improve ability to invest in education and other long term variables, which directly modify assets and in the last instance income. For that reason, prevention/compensation mechanisms are required. In Mexico, such mechanisms have been actively promoted by the State during the past 90 years, as part of the resulting social State implemented by post-revolutionary governments.11
2.3.2 Poverty and entitlements
Stressors, understood as continuous increasing pressure upon a unit, are analyzed in this section when approaching entitlements determinants in prevailing poverty in Mexico, i.e. the colonial legacy and industrialization patterns during the XX century. The following subsections are an attempt to define poverty for this work’s sake based on the vast conceptions and measurements of poverty in order to further present the most likely causes of structural poverty in this country.
Defining poverty implies dealing with a very controversial paradigm. There exists no consensus about what issues are embraced by poverty. However, a point of agreement among the vast existing literature on poverty seems to be that poverty is a lack of opportunities to reach a basic minimum level of well-being. In turn, well-being can also include several determinants, i.e. assets, infrastructure, social networks, institutions, human development, etc. This leads us to another point of agreement: poverty is a relative concept that deals with “minimums of well-being” (as in SEDESOL
11 A key argument in the current debate about development in developing countries is that income alone is an insufficient indicator of economic well-being. In response, various alternative supplementary measures have been proposed, including consumption-, income- and wealth-based indicators (SEDESOL 2002; Haveman and Wolff 2000; Slesnick 1993). The present work considers assets the ideal welfare measure. Despite recognizing that fact, this work approaches assets by household incomes in measuring economic vulnerability in chapter five. We did so because available statistics and data sources do not allow us to make assets’ quantitative analysis. Hence, quantitative analysis of economic vulnerability until assets level will be possible for only the individual municipalities that our case of study inquires through field work in chapter 4.
2002), “society’s hopes and aspirations to be fulfilled” (World 2001a), or “basic needs” (Todaro 2000), all varying widely among and within societies.12
Other concepts of poverty go beyond tangible factors and include rights issues, relationships, powerlessness, socioeconomic exclusion, and even loss of dignity (i.e. Elankumaran et al. 2000). Nevertheless, this work will only focus on those more quantitatively measurable economic dimensions of poverty.13
The World Bank 2004 Report on Poverty in Mexico estimated income poverty in Mexico at 51.7%, and consumption poverty at 51.3% of the population in year 2002 (World Bank 2004). In addition, the country has clear gaps in terms of purchasing power. According to the Poverty and Social Development Indicators of the Mexico’s Country Assistance Strategy (World Bank 2002), inequity in power of consumption is dramatic: Consumer price index shows 219, compared to food price index 227 (1995 = 100). Consumption in terms of income distribution reveals also high inequity in Mexico: the lowest (poorest) deciles consume only 4% of income, whereas the highest one consumes 56.7% (INEGI 2000; World Bank 2001a, 2001b).
However, both moderate and extreme poverty in Mexico is dramatic in rural areas. 74% of rural population lives in poverty -in urban areas it represents 36% (World Bank 2002). For its part, 20% of the Mexican population is reckoned to live in extreme poverty,14 from which 65% are in rural areas (World Bank 2004: 54). Also, the livelihood of 72% of the extreme poor in Mexico is agriculture (World Bank 2004: 54). Section 2.4 below presents a more detailed description of rural livelihoods and their links to vulnerability.
Low education is, in turn, much more concentrated in rural areas: 73% of rural extreme poverty has no education or incomplete primary –compared to 51.3% in urban extreme poverty. Nevertheless, it is still risky trying to explain income differences by merely education asymmetries. For instance, based on a regression analysis, the World Bank staff in Mexico estimated the contribution of household characteristics to rural-urban income differences, and reckons that 35% of that difference is due to disparities in educational levels, but employment characteristics explain ca. 50% of that difference (World Bank 2004: 57). That analysis compared employment characteristics between remunerations from agricultural and
12 For instance, infrastructure necessities in least developed countries consist conventionally on tap water and sanitation services, but in middle income countries like Mexico electricity is included as well.
13 Among measurements of poverty, there are two basic criteria: income and consumption. Incomebased measurements of poverty embrace the total current monetary and non-monetary inflow a household obtains from different functional sources, including wages, salaries, dividends, rents, etc. The use of income-based measurements is advantageous in that of allowing identifying those economic activities to be strengthened to reduce vulnerability, -tough more subject to errors due to difficulties in incorporating non-monetary income, self-consumption and transfers. Consumptionbased measurements consist of the total amount of monetary and non-monetary expenditure a household makes in all possible items. The advantage of using consumption-based measurements of poverty relies on the fact that it reflects smoothing strategies a household implement in response to sudden income fluctuations, i.e. family solidarity, aid, remittances (World Bank 2004).
14 Extreme poor consists of populations living below the food-based poverty line.
2 A conceptual framework of economic vulnerability
non-agricultural activities, attempting to reflect differences in a household’s living standard of being employed in industrial sectors relative to the agricultural ones.
Inequity in rural areas has increased throughout the last decade. Based on the Gini coefficient,15 the rural expenditure coefficient increased from 0.41 to 0.48 between 1992 and 2002, reaching its top in year 2000 with a 0.56 coefficient (World Bank 2004). Also, despite the fact that over 25% of the Mexican labor force works in agriculture, only 2.5% of total insured people by the Mexican Social Healthcare Institute (IMSS) work in this economic sector (INEGI 2003).
As in other Latin American countries, poverty in Mexico is a complex issue with ancient causes (e.g., land tenure) but also explained by dynamic factors and processes (e.g., economic policy and extern shocks). The former corresponds to the so-called original endowment16 in the form of initial allocation of wealth -after the Spanish conquest in our case of study. Factors like the industrialization model undertaken during the 50’s and 60’s provides some elements to understand poverty increase in the countryside.
On the one side, initial endowment during the colonial establishment margined indigenous population of wealth property, making them serve as slaves (Encomienda System) –even though some indigenous communities could work its arable land under permission and contributing to the colonial authority’s revenue. It worked in that way until the independence war (year 1810), when slavery was abolished, but even in spite of that fact, the most productive lands were already appropriated and concentrated in very few hands. So, at this first stage of independent life, dispossessed but now free farmers had to continue being still highly exploited by semifeudal productive systems. It was so basically because the resulting government of the independence war did not change the status quo of former wealth allocation derived from a sort of amnesty pact between insurgency, Catholic Church and colonial officials as pacification and independence conditions (Alaman 1968). The Mexican Revolution forced land redistribution (Aguilar and Meyer 1989), and a successful and gradual process was undertaken by the early post-revolutionary governments17 to improve conditions in the rural poor (Cosío-Villegas et al. 1991) and to eliminate the Hacienda system. But from the end of the 1940’s, industrial policy in Mexico seems to have been reoriented in favor of the industrial sector (Tejo 2000: 10).
The school of structural economics supported reorientation from an agricultural to an industrial driven economy in Latin-America. Raúl Prebisch (1951), one of the initiators of economic structuralism, points out that if one considers the high share
15 The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and 1 means perfect inequality (one person has all the income, everyone else has nothing).
16 For further details about Endowment, and Endowment Effect, see John List (University of Maryland), and Daniel Kahneman (Homo sapiens vs. Homo economicus).
17 Post-revolution is conventionally considered the period between the end of the government of Alvaro Obregon –the last Caudillo-, in 1928, and the end of the Second World War in 1945, characterized land redistribution, expropriation of the oil industry and the beginning of a model of economic growth based on imports substitution.
of working population employed in agriculture in Latin America, one can understand that land tenure is only part of the big issue about economic development. For him, any solution must first take into account that there will not be any improvement in people’s standard of life, as long as exceeding workforce in agriculture is not eliminated and redirected to higher productivity sectors. According to that efficiency approach, the sector expected to absorb such a displaced labor force was to be Industry.18 So, the economic pivot would be industry, which would become the most dynamic sector, able even to encourage agriculture by demanding increasingly raw materials (Figueroa 1991). Under these assumptions, agriculture would turn into an input provider for Industry. Proof of that are policies to deflate agricultural prices –especially those of primary goods- in order to encourage industry by means of making affordable industrial inputs. In practice, inability to sustain such an industrial policy in the long-term in Mexico led to failing in turning theory into reality (Montserrat and Chavez 2003).
During the 1950s, the first scholars of modern economic development identified industrialization and urbanization as the main structural change a country should undergo in order to improve welfare and for economic growth (Lewis 1954; Fein and Ranis 1961). The core of that argument is that, historically, economic systems are composed of sectors characterized by a clear difference in factor endowments. In such case, it is possible to shift factors from less to more productive sectors. Historically, this shift has taken place from agricultural to non-agricultural activities, and labor is the most frequent factor in motion.19 This reallocation of factors leads also to a rise in efficiency of food production, creating thus an agricultural surplus, which in turn provides the basis for fast industrialization and, further, for growth and poverty reduction. In addition, the tendency of higher relative value of manufactured to agricultural goods, known as the Prebisch-Singer Theory of Terms of Trade (Prebisch 1950, 1951; Singer 1950), is another crucial reasoning to base economic growth on Industry.
Contrary to theoretical expectations, labor transfers from rural to urban areas in Mexico have exceeded economic systems capacity of employment. The cost of urbanization is high when urban conditions are not appropriated to absorb additional workforce. Population in Mexico became prematurely urbanized in the sense that the share of urban population was greater than the current stage of development could support (Colosio-Murrieta 1979). Global crisis during the 70’s, oil crisis, high cost of public debt (due to the rise in international interest rates), along with wrong estimations on future country’s incomes, slowed down industrial production in the 1980’s, accompanied with an increasing carelessness about agriculture. As a result, the industry did not develop as expected and therefore was unable to absorb an exceeding labor force, which in fact had been released from agricultural activities.
18 Industry understood as the group of activities related to primary resources processing and manufactures.
19 For instance, the historic process of recognizing property titles to landlords in Britain embracing communal lands during the XVII and XVIII centuries forced displacements of enormous masses of rural workers to urban centers to meet the increasing workforce demand from the increasing industrialization process (Marx 1867; Ricardo 1817).
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CHAPTER IV.
Adventures in the course of my profligate Career. Motives which induce me to marry my Companion. Her exemplary Behaviour. A family Misfortune.
Having now settled myself in a manner much to my satisfaction, and happily met with a faithful friend, to whom I might confide my most secret thoughts, who would sincerely participate my joy, when success crowned my pursuits; and who, in the hour of adversity, would condole with, and cherish me, I applied myself with redoubled assiduity to the acquirement of money, with a full resolution in the event of my meeting with one good booty, or realizing by degrees a sufficient sum to quit the hazardous course of life I had embarked in, to establish myself in some honest line of business. To this prudent measure I was also strongly prompted by my companion, who could not hide her fears and anxiety on my account, and was never easy during my absence from home on a depredatory excursion. I continued to visit the shops as usual in the morning, and the theatres in the evening with tolerable success; and my partner having expressed a desire to accompany me, in the hope of rendering me service, I was induced to gratify her. As her figure and address were both extremely prepossessing, and her air perfectly genteel, I soon found her eminently useful; for she not only received from me the property I purloined, but with much ingenuity would contrive to engross the attention of the shopkeeper while I robbed his counter, or by artful gallanting with a gentleman at a public place, facilitate my design upon his pockets. At all times, when disengaged from these hazardous practices, we lived a life of perfect domestic happiness, our chiefest pleasure being centred in each other’s company.
As our mutual affection increased, my companion, whom I had informed of the outlines of my past life, and who was aware of the dangers to which I was daily exposed, being filled with tender fears of losing me for ever, and prompted by sincere affection, suggested the idea of uniting ourselves indissolubly by marriage; in the hope
that should I unhappily experience a reverse of fortune, and be again banished from my native country, she might obtain permission to share my misery, and contribute, by her society, to lessen my sufferings. This proposal so fully convinced me of her undisguised attachment, and had so much reason on its side, that I gave into it with ardent pleasure; and the necessary preliminaries being adjusted, we were accordingly married at St. Paul’s, Covent-Garden, on the 21st of July, 1808, her mother, to whom she had become reconciled, and who (judging by appearances,) had a favourable opinion of the match, assisting at the ceremony
Soon afterwards, I communicated the event to my mother, informing her that weighty reasons had rendered it necessary to observe privacy on the occasion; and hinting to the unsuspecting old woman, that I had acquired by this marriage, a considerable pecuniary advantage. This intimation gave my mother great pleasure, and I took care by increased liberality towards her and my sisters, to confirm them in the opinion of my veracity. The behaviour of my wife became every day more exemplary; and had I been free from that remorse which must ever accompany a guilty life, and enabled to procure those necessary comforts which I knew so well how to enjoy, by upright means, I should have considered myself supremely happy. In the beginning of the month of October, my wife, who was far advanced in her pregnancy, accompanied me one evening to Drury-lane theatre; and the performance being over, we were descending the stair-case from the box-lobby, when I attempted to possess myself of a gentleman’s pocket-book; but by some accident he suspected my design, and publicly accused me therewith. Unfortunately several other gentlemen, who had been robbed in the course of the evening, being on the spot, and beginning to compare notes, agreed unanimously that they recollected my person as being near them about the time they were robbed, and did not scruple to insinuate that I ought to be detained and searched. This conversation naturally attracted the attention of the company immediately round us; but while it took place, all the parties were obliged by the pressure of the throng behind to continue descending, and we in fact quitted the theatre all together. Being arrived in Little Russell-street, the gentlemen surrounded me to the
number of about a score, and our altercation became loud and vehement. Fortunately for me no police-officers happened to be near the spot; for although I had nothing to fear from a search, yet the circumstance would have made me personally known to the latter, and would of course operate to my disadvantage on my future appearance at the theatre. I exerted every art of expostulation, and finally had recourse, on my part, to threats, affecting to feel highly insulted by their insolent insinuations; declared myself a gentleman of character, which I would prove to their cost; offered to give my card of address, or to retire to a coffee-house, and send for respectable persons who knew me, but all my rhetoric proved ineffectual; some were for giving me in charge to an officer; others still more violent were for having me pumped. At this moment a person named G—ge W—k—n, now in this colony, who had been himself exercising his vocation in the pit of the theatre, happened fortunately to come up, and seeing a crowd collected, stopped to ascertain the cause. He immediately perceived the critical situation in which I stood, and having the appearance of a man of fashion, he stepped forward, and hearing the various motions of my persecutors, strongly advised them to forbearance, and caution how they treated a gentleman, as I evidently appeared to be; urging that they must certainly be mistaken in their conjectures, that my proposal of giving my address, or a reference, ought to be sufficient, and particularly dwelt on the impropriety of taking the law into their own hands. These arguments of my friend W—k—n carried so much weight, that the gentlemen began to waver and grow less clamorous; till at length they dropped off one by one; and W—k—n, assuming a haughty tone, said, taking me by the arm, “Come, Sir, you have been sufficiently exposed, and long enough detained on a charge which I am confident there is no foundation for; allow me to conduct you from this spot; if you are going towards St. James’s, I shall be glad of your company, and let me see (raising his voice and cane together,) who will dare to insult you further.” So saying, he led me away in triumph, tipping the wink to my poor wife, who had stood all the while at a small distance, much terrified and agitated by various emotions, which so much affected her, that though we lived within two hundred yards of the theatre, she had scarcely power to walk home; and we
had no sooner quitted our kind conductor, who attended us to the door, than she fainted away, and was for sometime insensible. The consequences of this untoward event were still more seriously afflicting, for her tender constitution was not proof against the shock, and she was the next day prematurely delivered of a male child, which, however, only lived eight hours, and was a subject of infinite regret to us both.
CHAPTER V.
Adventure of the Silver Snuff-box. Its Consequences. My narrow Escape from Transportation, which I have since had reason to regret.
Happening soon after the adventure at Drury-lane, to read an advertisement, stating that a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Middlesex would be convened on the 11th of November, at the Mermaid Tavern, Hackney, to consider of the expediency of petitioning the Throne on the subject of parliamentary reform, it struck me that I might find it worth while to attend this meeting, as it would probably attract a large concourse of people, and, as at such assemblies riots and much confusion frequently occurred, which afforded a favourable opportunity for plundering the pockets of the company. On the day appointed, I accordingly left town in one of the Hackney stages, and arriving at the Mermaid about one o’clock, found the sheriffs had just opened the business of the meeting, which was held in a large room commonly used as an assemblyroom for dancing, and detached from the tavern itself. To my disappointment, however, there were not above three hundred persons collected, and the building being very spacious, there was not the least prospect of any violent pressure taking place. Before I commenced my operations, I entered a small house called “The Tap,” immediately contiguous to, but distinct from, the Mermaid; and going into a parlour, called to the landlady, a decent looking elderly woman, for a glass of brandy and water, and a pipe. Having taken and paid for this refreshment, I proceeded to the meeting; and found, so far from any tumult or uproar, that the whole company were collected at one end of the room, and listening in profound silence to the speech of some popular and patriotic orator, who was warmly censuring the conduct of ministers, and advocating the cause of liberty. I now entered the thickest part of the crowd, and having tried the pockets of a great many persons without feeling a single pocketbook, I at length extracted successively two snuff-boxes from
different gentlemen; but their coats being buttoned up, and the pockets inside, I was obliged to use my scissors in cutting the bottom of each pocket, before I could obtain the desired prizes. This trouble and risk I should not have incurred had not I assured myself that the boxes from their shape, &c.; were both silver; but to my mortification, they proved on inspection, the one wood, and the other a sort of japanned leather, though both perfectly genteel, and mounted with silver: however, as they were of no intrinsic value to me, I threw them away; and, although it was rather imprudent, I entered the room a third time, in hopes of better success. I soon found myself standing behind a well-dressed man, who was wrapped in deep attention to the speaker, and perceived to my great joy that he had a small leather pocket-book in his inside coat-pocket, and also a very fine large snuff-box, evidently silver, from its shape and weight. I had again recourse to my scissors, and having made an incision, extracted the contents of the pocket, with which I hastily retired: but I was again partially disappointed, for I found that what I had taken for a pocket-book, was in fact merely a pen and ink-case: the box, however, was a very elegant one, and quite new. Although it appeared that I was not destined to be very fortunate in this day’s adventure, I determined to make one other trial; but as it would be dangerous to keep the stolen box about me, and I saw no convenient spot in which to conceal it, I adopted the following method to dispose of it, while I made my final attempt in the assembly-room. Going into the little tap-house before described, I addressed the landlady, inquiring if she sold any snuff, or could without inconvenience, procure me a little. She answered that she had none, but would get me some in a very short time. I thanked her, and replied that as I was anxious to hear the debates in the assembly-room, she would oblige me by procuring an ounce of rappee, for which purpose I handed her the box I had just obtained, saying I would call for it in a quarter of an hour. Having now, as I conceived, effectually and safely deposited my prize, I left the Tap with an intention of re-entering the meeting-room; but suddenly changing my mind, I determined to desist, having by the box alone secured the expenses of my journey, and to return immediately home. However, as I felt hungry, and saw no signs of
accommodation for eating in the Tap, I proceeded a little way up the street, till I came to a sort of cook’s-shop, where I procured a lunch, and then returned to reclaim my snuff-box from my obliging old landlady, having been absent from her barely a quarter of an hour. Going boldly up to the little bar in which she sat, I inquired if she had procured me the snuff; she replied that she had, and turning round to a cupboard behind her, produced the box, which I held out my hand to receive; but, to my utter confusion, I was prevented by the gentleman himself, from whom I had stolen it, who, starting from a dark corner of the passage close to my elbow, where he had been concealed, received the box in his hand, and turning to me, inquired in a peremptory tone, if that was my snuff-box? I answered with a smile, “No, Sir, it is a box that I found—if you have any claim to it, it is much at your service.” He then inquired where I had found it; I replied, that going to make water in a corner of the stable-yard, I perceived something shine amongst some rubbish, which taking up, I found to be the box in question; that I was myself in the habit of taking snuff, and having that day left my own box at home, I thought it a good opportunity of getting a supply; that I had therefore commissioned the landlady to procure me some snuff, and left her this box for that purpose. The gentleman rejoined, that he had been robbed of the box in the assembly-room, and that having found it in my possession, he felt it incumbent to detain me, on strong suspicion of being the thief. All I could urge, and every art I tried, were ineffectual to convince this rigid gentleman of my innocence, and several others joining him, one of them asked my name and situation in life. I answered, that when charged with so disgraceful an act as that of picking pockets, I should certainly decline giving such explanation; but that I should at a proper season, be enabled to refute the accusation, and prove my respectability. To this the inquirer replied, that although himself a justice of peace, he certainly had no wish to extort, nor was I obliged to give any answers against my inclination, and that upon the whole, he could not censure me for preserving silence; however, as the property stolen had been traced to me, it became his duty and that of the owner, to have me detained till I gave an account of myself. A constable being called in, was now desired to search me, which he proceeded to do, and the first thing
he found was a pair of small scissors without a sheath, in my breeches-pocket, where I had in my hurry deposited them after cutting out my last booty. The constable exhibited these with an air of triumph, exclaiming to the by-standers, “See, gentlemen, here are the tools the pocket was cut with!” He also took from me about fifty shillings in loose money, a pocket-bock, card-case, pair of silver spectacles, a two-bladed knife, silver pencil-case, tobacco-box, handkerchief, gloves, &c., all my own property, and such as I usually carried about me. I had left my watch at home, which, it being a valuable one, I was frequently persuaded by my wife to do when I went upon such excursions as the present. The meeting being by this time dissolved, the loser of the box set off on his return to town, and I was left in charge of two constables who were to follow with me. In about an hour, a coach being obtained, I was conveyed to Worship-street office for examination, where I arrived at six in the evening, just as the magistrate had taken the chair. This worshipful justice was Joseph Moser, esq., a gentleman of an eccentric character, and the same, if I mistake not, whose name I have frequently met with in print, as the author of many well-written and humorous essays, &c., in periodical works. Being placed at the bar, the prosecutor, who proved to be a Mr. Imeson, tobacconist, in Holywell-lane, Shoreditch, made his appearance in the same coat he had on in the morning, and exhibiting his pocket, through the bottom of which he thrust his hand by way of demonstration. He stated, that he was that day attending the meeting of freeholders at Hackney, and while listening to the debates in the assembly-room, he had occasion to take snuff; when putting his hand in his pocket, he found the bottom of it cut, apparently with a sharp scissors, and not only his snuff-box, but every other article taken out; that he was sure the depredation was recent, as he had taken snuff but a few minutes before, and had not since changed his position: that he staid to hear the conclusion of the business, and on leaving the room, was relating his loss to some gentlemen in the inn-yard, and that a little boy happening to overhear him, stepped up and said, “Sir, my mother has got a pretty snuff-box, that a gentleman gave her to put some snuff in;” on which he was induced to accompany the child to its parents, where, requesting to see the box, he found it to be his
own; that he had then taken the measures for my detection, which I have above related. The landlady, Mrs. Andrews, was then sworn, and stated my coming to her house, taking some refreshment, and afterwards returning to inquire for snuff, leaving her the box, &c., all which, she said was transacted in the most public manner; and, the good woman voluntarily added, that she could never suppose I should have acted as I had done, had I been the person who stole the box. The officer who had searched me, now produced the articles taken from my person, not forgetting to dwell upon the circumstance of the open scissors, the sheath of which he found in another pocket. The magistrate viewing these articles with attention, observed, that he had no doubt of their being all stolen, and ordered them to be advertised in the daily papers, and that I should be brought up again on that day week, when it was probable the persons who had lost such articles, would attend to identify them. As to the present charge, he said the case was clear enough, and he would, to save further trouble, bind over the parties to prosecute at once. Then addressing me, his worship inquired my name, place of abode, &c. I answered, that my name was James Hardy, but I must beg to decline giving any further account of myself, as it appeared his worship was determined to commit me for trial, and I should therefore not trouble my friends until a future day. Mr. Moser now remarked on some of the articles found upon me, inquiring with a sarcastic grin, how long I had worn barnacles? As to the knife, he said it was evidently a thief’s knife; and turning to Armstrong, one of his officers, he asked him, if that was not such a blade as they used for starring a glaze? The knife and scissors, his worship called my working-tools. It was in vain I assured this facetious justice that these things were my own lawful property, and offered to prove where I had purchased them all: he insisted on detaining them, and was hardly persuaded to return the money taken from me. I was then committed to New Prison, Clerkenwell, to which I was conveyed about nine o’clock at night. Arriving there, I desired to be accommodated between-gates, and after paying the usual fees, &c., I was conducted to a bed in the same room I had occupied on a like occasion, in the year 1800. Having now leisure to reflect on the occurrences of the day, I began to consider my situation hopeless
enough; the snuff-box having been traced to me, the circumstance of the pocket being cut, the scissors found, &c., altogether furnished a chain of evidence, too strong, I feared, to be overruled by my bare assertion, that I had found the property; a defence the most flimsy, but the most commonly resorted to. I, therefore, laid my account with being transported at least. What heightened my present distress was, that my poor wife would be grievously alarmed at my not returning home this night; and it would be a difficult matter, even the next day, to inform her of my situation, as I knew the officers were intent upon discovering, if possible, my place of abode, in order to ascertain my character, and mode of life. The morning being come, I was fortunate enough to meet with an intimate acquaintance, by whom I despatched a message to my wife, requiring her to visit me immediately, and in an hour’s time, I had the pleasure of seeing her appear. Her distress may be easily conceived. I comforted and encouraged her as well as I could; and giving her a strict caution not to suffer herself to be followed or watched in her return, desired she would wait with patience, and hope for the approach of the session, which would decide my fate. During the interval of my second examination, I read the following advertisement inserted by the officers of Worship-street:—“Stopped upon a suspicious person now in custody, the undermentioned articles, supposed to be stolen; [here they were all minutely described.] Any persons having lost such goods, are desired to attend at this office on Friday next, when the said person will be brought up for re-examination, &c.” On the 18th of November, I was accordingly reconducted to Worship-street, my wife being permitted to accompany me in the coach. Being again brought before Mr. Moser, that gentleman inquired if any body was in attendance to claim the property found on me; and being answered in the negative, he expressed himself confident that claimants would appear, but said he would, however, finally commit me to Newgate, and, that the articles in question should be detained until the day of my trial; when, if not owned before, the court would no doubt restore them on my application; nor could all my asseverations or arguments convince him of the property being my own, or induce him to alter his decree respecting them. I was accordingly conducted to Newgate,
accompanied by my wife, whose uniform attention to me in this and every other distress, proved the sincerity of her attachment.
As the session was to commence on the 30th, I had no time to lose in preparing for my trial. I, therefore, drew up a brief for counsel, in which I dwelt strongly on the open and public manner in which I had acted with Mrs. Andrews; the improbability that I should have taken so much trouble, had I been the thief who stole the box, full of snuff, as the prosecutor described it to have been, and on every other point which I thought might prove of moment, or afford the counsel an opportunity of shewing his wit or ingenuity, but still deceiving even him, by stoutly adhering to my first story of finding the property. This brief I sent by my wife, with the usual fee, to Mr. Knapp, a gentleman, of whose abilities I entertained a high opinion. Notwithstanding all this, I had at the bottom, very little hopes of escaping conviction; and persons best experienced in such matters, who heard the circumstances, declared nothing but a miracle could save me. I, however, concealed these unpleasing ideas from my wife, and assured her that I felt confident of being acquitted. The grand jury being met, I soon heard that a true bill had been returned by them; and, on the following Wednesday, the court opening, I was taken down for trial, but was not put to the bar until Friday the 2d of December. Previous to my leaving the ward of the prison in which I lodged, a fellow-prisoner, with whom I had become intimate, knowing the circumstances of my case, and the nature of my intended defence, had in a half-jocular manner, offered to lend me his snuffbox, which he advised me to display to the court, and occasionally to take a pinch from it during my trial; this he observed, would strengthen my assertion that I was in the habit of using snuff, and give a colour to my defence; and, he good-naturedly added, that he hoped it would prove lucky to me. I thankfully accepted the proffered favour, of which I did not fail to make use at the proper season. Being arraigned at the bar, I stood capitally indicted for stealing a silver snuff-box, value two pounds, the property of Thomas Imeson, privily from his person. Mr. Imeson having given his evidence, my counsel in cross-examining him said, “I take for granted, Sir, you can’t take upon yourself to swear, whether you were robbed of your snuff-box, or whether it fell through the hole in your pocket; all you
know is, that you found your pocket torn, and the box among other articles missing?” Answer, “Certainly I cannot.” The landlady then stated in a faltering voice, and evidently much embarrassed at being examined before so large an assembly, the manner in which I had applied to her, &c., and in answer to a question from Mr. Knapp, said, that she could never suppose I should have acted in the open manner I did, if I had stolen the box. The constable who searched me was the next witness; and he having described that proceeding, and produced the articles found upon me, the Recorder, who presided on the bench, said, “I suppose, Mr Bell, there were a great variety of characters attending this meeting, which was held for the purpose of obtaining parliamentary reform?”
Ans. “Certainly, my lord.”
Recorder. “No doubt there were many persons, freeholders as well as not freeholders?”
Ans. “Yes, my lord.”
Recorder. “I dare say people of all descriptions, tag-rag, and bobtail?”
Ans. “There might, my lord.”
I now began to entertain strong hopes, perceiving that the tide of prejudice ran in my favour. I was dressed in a very genteel but becoming manner, and had not the least appearance of a thief. I had put on the most modest air and countenance I could assume, and I thought the court and jury appeared to view me with favourable eyes. I, therefore, took another pinch from my friend’s box, and waited the event with patience, being prepared with a good defence, when called upon to make it. But I was not put to that trouble; for the Recorder addressing the jury, said, “Gentlemen, I must in this stage of the trial, deliver it as my opinion, that I cannot see any grounds for charging the prisoner with felony. Gentlemen, the accident of finding a snuff-box might have happened to one of yourselves, to me, or to any other honest man; and, it would be hard indeed if such an accident should subject the finder to a prosecution for felony. If you are of my opinion, it will be unnecessary to recapitulate the evidence,
or put the prisoner upon his defence.” His Lordship then paused, and I leave the reader to imagine the state of suspense I was for some moments in. The jury having whispered together, one of them stood up and said, “My lord, we wish to ask a question of Mrs. Andrews, namely, whether at the time the prisoner brought her the box, he delivered it as his own, or said he had found it?” Mr. Knapp eagerly catching at this question, desired Mrs Andrews to stand up, and said to her, “Mrs. Andrews, the jury wish to ask you whether the young man at the bar told you it was his own snuff-box, or whether he said he had found it?” The poor simple woman, confused and trembling, and not comprehending the drift or importance of the question, answered in a low voice, “He said he had found it, gentlemen.” Mr. Knapp having obtained this answer, with a smile, or rather laugh of satisfaction, turned to the jury, repeating her words, “He said, he had found it. I hope, Gentlemen, you are now satisfied.” He then folded up my brief, and handed it to an officer of the court, to whom he made a motion with his hand to return it to me. I received it with a respectful bow of acknowledgment, and Mr. Knapp threw himself back in his seat, and began playing with his watch-chain, as much as to say, “the business is settled, I have successfully done my duty, and saved my client;” and, so indeed he had, for the foreman immediately pronounced the welcome verdict of “Not Guilty.” There is one circumstance to which my acquittal on this occasion may be in a great measure imputed; namely, that I was fortunately not known by any of the turnkeys or officers of the court, who never fail when an old face appears, to give a private intimation to the judge, if (which is very rare) he should not himself recognise the party. I now applied to the court for the articles taken from me, which the Recorder ordered to be restored; but first expressed a wish to view them, saying to the constable, “Let me look at those articles, Mr. Bell, there is nothing remarkable in them I suppose.” The malicious constable answered, “No, my lord, without it is the scissors.” The Recorder, having minutely examined them, replied “I see nothing extraordinary in them neither, Mr. Bell, except that they appear to be remarkable good ones—poo, poo, let the young man have his property by all means:” on which the fellow, evidently chagrined, delivered the whole into my hands. As to the snuff-box, his Lordship observed, there could be no
doubt but it was the same which Mr Imeson had lost, though he could only speak to its identity, as being of the same pattern, having bought it but a few days before the accident, and there being no mark which he could know it by: he was, therefore, ordered to retain it. I then bowed with gratitude to the court and jury, and with respect to the auditors, and quitting the bar, had my irons knocked off, and was received with open arms by my dear wife, who had been waiting the issue in anxious suspense, accompanied by my friend Bromley. We all three returned to the prison, where I had left some little matters, and every one was astonished at my acquittal. I restored the borrowed snuff-box to my kind friend, not forgetting to acknowledge its beneficial effects by a present to himself, and a liberal treat to the whole ward. I afterwards sent for a coach, in which myself, my wife, and old companion, were driven to my lodgings in Duke’s-court, Drury-lane; and, I need not add, that we spent the remainder of the day in festivity, and heartfelt satisfaction. To account for my absence from home, my wife had informed the landlord, that I had met with an accident while at a friend’s house a few miles from town, and could not be removed until I was perfectly recovered. Notwithstanding I blessed Heaven for this fortunate escape, which I had so little reason to expect, and thought myself supremely happy in recovering my liberty; yet I have ever since regretted that I was not then convicted, as there is little doubt but the capital part of the charge would have been done away with, and I should only have been transported for seven years, consequently, at the period of my writing these Memoirs, I should have had only a few months to serve before I became a free-man; whereas the sequel will shew that I was in a short time afterwards cast for death, and now find myself in the hopeless and deplorable situation of a prisoner for life!
CHAPTER VI.
Visit Mr. Bilger, an eminent Jeweller. His Politeness, and the Return I made for it. Perfidy of a Pawnbroker. Obliged to decamp with Precipitation.
The next adventure I shall have occasion to relate, more fully confirms the justice of the remark, that the connexions formed by persons during temporary confinement in a jail, commonly lead to further acts of wickedness, and frequently entail on the parties a more severe punishment than that which they have just escaped. This was exactly my unhappy case, and I now come to the most fatal era of my eventful life.
In the same ward with myself were confined two brothers, very genteel young men, who had been recently cast for death for privately stealing some valuable rings, &c., from the shop of a Jeweller in Leadenhall-street. As a conformity of character, or similarity of pursuits, is the strongest source of friendship, so these persons and myself had become very intimately acquainted. In the course of our frequent conversations on the subject with which we were all three alike most conversant, the brothers informed me that they had, like myself, made a successful tour of the jewellers’ shops in London; and on our comparing notes as to the particular persons we had robbed, or attempted to rob, they pointed out about half a dozen shops, which, it appeared, I had omitted to visit, arising either from their making no display of their goods, or from their being situated in private streets, where I had no idea of finding any such trades. Though at that time neither they nor myself entertained much hope of my acquittal, it was agreed that in the event of my being so fortunate as to recover my freedom, I should pay my respects to the several tradesmen I had so overlooked; and I promised, in case I was successful, to make them a pecuniary acknowledgment in return for their information. At the moment of my joyful departure from Newgate, they accordingly furnished me with a list of the shops in question, and gave me full instructions and useful hints for my
guidance therein. They particularly pointed out Mr Bilger, a goldsmith and jeweller of the first eminence in Piccadilly. This gentleman, they assured me, I should find, in the technical phrase, a good flat. They advised me to bespeak a diamond ring, or similar article, and to request a sight of some loose diamonds for the purpose of selecting such stones as I might wish to have set, informing me that he was generally provided with a large quantity, which he would not fail to shew me, and that I might with ease purloin a good number of them. A day or two after my release, I made the prescribed experiments, and was fortunate enough to succeed pretty well at nearly every shop, but I reserved Mr. Bilger for my final essay, as he was the principal object of consideration, and from whom I expected to obtain the most valuable booty. On the day se’ennight after my trial at the Old Bailey, I prepared in due form to pay him a visit. About five o’clock in the evening, I entered his shop, dressed in the most elegant style, having a valuable gold watch and appendages, a gold eye-glass, &c. I had posted my old friend and aid-de-camp, Bromley, at the door, in order to be in readiness to act as circumstances might require, and particularly to watch the motions of Mr. Bilger and his assistants on my quitting the premises. On my entrance Mrs. Bilger issued from a back-parlour behind the shop, and politely inquiring my business, I told her I wished to see Mr. Bilger; she immediately rang a bell, which brought down her husband from the upper apartments. He saluted me with a low bow, and handed me a seat. I was glad to find no other person in the shop, Mrs. Bilger having again retired. I now assumed the air of a Bond-street lounger, and informed Mr. Bilger that I had been recommended by a gentleman of my acquaintance to deal with him, having occasion for a very elegant diamond ring, and requested to see his assortment. Mr. Bilger expressed his concern that he happened not to have a single article of that description by him, but if I could without inconvenience call again, he would undertake in one hour to procure me a selection from his working-jeweller, to whom he would immediately despatch a messenger. I affected to feel somewhat disappointed, but looking at my watch, after a moment’s reflection, I said, “Well, Mr. Bilger, I have an appointment at the Canon coffee-house, which requires my attendance, and if you will
without fail have the articles ready, I may probably look in a little after six.” This he promised faithfully to do, declaring how much he felt obliged by my condescension; and I sauntered out of the shop, Mr. Bilger attending me in the most obsequious manner to the outer door. After walking a short distance, Bromley tapped me on the shoulder, and inquired what conduct I meant next to pursue; for he had viewed my proceedings through a glass-door in the shop, and saw that I had not executed my grand design. I related to Bromley the result of my conversation with Mr. Bilger, and added that I meant to retire to the nearest public-house, where we could enjoy a pipe and a glass of negus until the expiration of the hour to which I had limited myself. We accordingly regaled ourselves at a very snug house, nearly opposite Bilger’s, until about half after six, when I again repaired to the scene of action, leaving Bromley, as at first, posted at the door. Mr. Bilger received me with increased respect, and producing a small card box, expressed his sorrow that his workman had only been enabled to send three rings for my inspection, but that if they were not to my taste he should feel honoured and obliged in taking my directions for having one made, and flattered himself he should execute the order to my satisfaction. I proceeded to examine the rings he produced, one of which was marked sixteen guineas, another nine guineas, and the third six guineas. They were all extremely beautiful, but I affected to consider them as too paltry, telling Mr. Bilger that I wanted one to present to a lady, and that I wished to have a ring of greater value than the whole three put together, as a few guineas would not be an object in the price. Mr. Bilger’s son, who was also his partner, now joined us, and was desired by his father to sketch a draught in pencil of some fancy rings, agreeable to the directions I should give him. The three rings I had viewed, were now removed to the end of the counter next the window, and I informed the young man that I wished to have something of a cluster, a large brilliant in the centre, surrounded with smaller ones; but repeated my desire that no expense might be spared to render the article strictly elegant, and worthy a lady’s acceptance. The son having sketched a design of several rings on a card, I examined them with attention, and appeared in doubt which to prefer, but desired to see some loose diamonds, in order to form a
better idea of the size, &c., of each ring described in the drawing. Mr Bilger, however, declared he had not any by him. It is probable he spoke truth: or he might have lost such numbers by shewing them, as to deter him from exhibiting them in future. Without having made up my mind on the subject, I now requested to see some of his most fashionable broaches or shirt-pins. Mr. Bilger produced a shewglass, containing a great variety of articles in pearl, but he had nothing of the kind in diamonds. I took up two or three of the broaches and immediately sunk a very handsome one marked three guineas, in my coat sleeve. I next purloined a beautiful clasp for a lady’s waist, consisting of stones set in gold, which had the brilliancy and appearance of real diamonds, but marked only four guineas. I should probably have gone still deeper, but at this moment a lady coming in, desired to look at some ear-rings, and the younger Mr. Bilger immediately quitted his father to attend upon her at the other end of the shop. It struck me that now was my time for a decisive stroke. The card containing the diamond rings, procured from the maker, lying very near the shew-glass I was viewing, and many small articles irregularly placed round about them, the candles not throwing much light upon that particular spot, and Mr. Bilger’s attention being divided between myself and the lady, to whom he frequently addressed himself, I suddenly took the three rings from the card, and committed them to my sleeve to join the broach and lady’s clasp; but had them so situated that I could in a moment have released and replaced them on the counter, had an inquiry been made for them. I then looked at my watch, and observing that I was going to the theatre, told Mr. Bilger that I would not trouble him any further, as the articles before me were too tawdry and common to please me, but that I would put the card of draughts in my pocketbook, and if I did not meet with a ring of the kind I wanted before Monday or Tuesday, I would certainly call again and give him final directions. I was then drawing on my gloves, being anxious to quit the shop while I was well; but Mr Bilger, who seemed delighted with the prospect of my custom, begged so earnestly that I would allow him to shew me his brilliant assortment of gold watches that I could not refuse to gratify him, though I certainly incurred a great risk by my compliance. I, therefore, answered, “Really, Mr. Bilger, I am loth
to give you that unnecessary trouble, as I have, you may perceive, a very good watch already, in point of performance; though it cost me a mere trifle, only twenty guineas; but it answers my purpose as well as a more valuable one. However, as I may probably, before long, want an elegant watch for a lady, I don’t care if I just run my eye over them.” Mr. Bilger replied, that the greater part of his stock were fancy watches adapted for ladies, and he defied all London united to exhibit a finer collection. He then took from his window a shew-glass, containing about thirty most beautiful watches, some ornamented with pearls or diamonds, others elegantly enamelled, or chased in the most delicate style. They were of various prices, from thirty to one hundred guineas, and the old gentleman rubbing his hands with an air of rapture, exclaimed, “There they are, Sir; a most fashionable assortment of goods; allow me to recommend them; they’re all agoing, Sir—all a-going.” I smiled inwardly at the latter part of this speech, and thought to myself, “I wish they were going, with all my heart, along with the diamond rings.” I answered, they were certainly very handsome, but I would defer a minute inspection of them till my next visit, when I should have more time to spare. These watches were ranged in exact order, in five parallel lines, and between each watch was placed a gold seal or other trinket appertaining to a lady’s watch. It was no easy matter, therefore, to take away a single article without its being instantly missed, unless the economy of the whole had been previously deranged. I contrived, however, to displace a few of the trinkets, on pretence of admiring them, and ventured to secrete one very rich gold seal marked six guineas. I then declared I could stay no longer, as I had appointed to meet a party at the theatre; but that I would certainly call again in a few days, and lay out some money in return for the trouble I had given. Mr. Bilger expressed his thanks in the most respectful terms, and waited upon me to the door, where he took leave of me with a very low congé, à la mode de France, of which country he was a native. I now put the best foot foremost, and having gained a remote street, turned my head, and perceived Bromley at my heels, who seized my hand, congratulating me on my success, and complimenting me on the address I had shewn in this exploit; for he had witnessed all that passed, and knew that I had succeeded in my object, by the manner
in which I quitted the shop. He informed me that Mr Bilger, had returned to his counter, and without attending to the arrangement of the articles thereon, had joined his son who was still waiting upon the lady, and that he, Bromley, had finally left them both engaged with her.
Having thus happily achieved this adventure we returned to my lodgings, where I displayed the booty I had made, and gratified Bromley with a couple of guineas for his trouble, which fully satisfied him, as I did not take him with me on terms of equal partnership. The next morning, Saturday, on reviewing the articles, my wife was so much pleased with one of the rings, (a beautiful ruby, surrounded with rose-diamonds, price six guineas,) which exactly fitted her forefinger, that I suffered her to retain it for wearing on extraordinary occasions; and I myself determined to keep the one marked sixteen guineas, (which was a double rowed brilliant half hoop,) for my little finger. As to the nine-guinea ring, (which was composed of brilliants, having a space for hair in the centre,) I sold it immediately, together with the gold seal, to a Jew-receiver, with whom I had frequent dealings. The broach I also took a fancy to for my own wear, and the gold clasp I presented to my wife. In the evening of this day I visited my friends in Newgate, (the two brothers,) and acknowledged the service they had rendered me by a suitable present, besides regaling the whole ward with a treat of ale and porter.
In the interval between my discharge from confinement, and my visit to Mr. Bilger, I one day went to the shop of a pawnbroker, in Brydges-street, Covent-garden, for the purpose of pledging some seals, rings, and other trinkets, which I had purloined at the several shops to which the brothers had recommended me. I had frequently pledged similar articles at this shop, as well as many others, because I could get nearly fifty per cent more by that means than a common receiver would give for the same goods, and I afterwards sold the duplicates among my acquaintances, or to the Jews, by which I gained a still further advance. I entered a private box, as is usual with persons who wish to observe secrecy; and the pawnbroker, whose name was Turner, coming himself to wait on me, I produced my goods, demanding a certain sum upon them. Mr.
