of England, sought and obtained a monopoly of the South Sea trade on condition that the national floating debt, then about ten millions, should be paid out of its surplus profits!! Though perhaps no wilder scheme was ever propounded, it readily received the sanction of Parliament, and consequently a thousand and one other bubbles were speedily projected. The disastrous results are well known: thousands of families once well to do were irretrievably ruined, and the frenzy with which the people were seized, together with the impulse given to every form of gambling instead of to the steady pursuits of industry, materially aided the convulsion caused by the bursting of these bubbles, thus for many years paralysing commerce in all its branches, and laying prostrate the energies of the country.
Seized for a time with the spirit of insane speculation, the people thought of nothing else, and though in our own day we have witnessed many wild schemes submitted for public support, none have really proved so thoroughly disastrous in their results as those which were then launched. South Sea stock of 100l. sold for 1000l.; the Orkney Fishery stock rose from 25l. to 250l.; the York Buildings stock, whose shares were 10l., reached 260l. The latter, a company erected to cut timber for ship-building and other purposes in Scotland, in spite of a protectionist bounty, proved a ruinous failure. There were besides eleven fishing projects; ten insurance companies; two companies for the remittance of money; four salt companies; two sugar companies; eleven companies for settlements in, or trading to, America; two building companies; thirteen land companies;
