six oil companies; four harbour and river companies; four companies for supplying London with coal, cattle, and hay, and for paving the streets; six hemp, flax, and linen companies; five companies for carrying on the manufacture of silks and cottons; one for planting mulberry-trees in Chelsea Park, and breeding silkworms;[1] fifteen mining companies; and some sixty more miscellaneous bubbles of the most preposterous character. One undertaking actually obtained subscriptions for an object "which in due time should be revealed!"
The bubble bursts, 1720. But the South Sea Company, the greatest bubble of the lot, having prosecuted some of the rival bubble companies, and obtained a writ of scire facias from the Queen's Bench, all stocks fell suddenly; and the South Sea scheme itself collapsed in the general ruin which ensued. The price of its stock fell from 1000l. to 175l. in a few weeks. The delusion was at an end, and the English nation awaking from its dreams of boundless wealth to a sense of its degradation, a terrible commercial distress ensued. Parliament stepped in at last with
- ↑ The attempt to grow mulberry-trees in England with the view of providing food for silkworms was not new. It had been suggested by James I. in 1608, indeed a patent had been granted for the same purpose to Walter Lord Aston in 1629 (see Macpherson, ii. pp. 250 and 358). But this scheme had failed, probably owing to the coldness or damp of the English climate; even in France, as is well known, mulberries are not found to grow sufficiently well north of the Loire. The ground secured for the mulberry plantation, in 1721, was Lord Wharton's park, of about forty acres, at Chelsea. In Reed's 'Weekly Journal,' Aug. 21, 1721, it is stated that "there is a great concourse of foreigners and others daily in Chelsea Park to see the Raw Silk undertaking, for which a patent was granted by his present Majesty." One very ancient mulberry-tree still survives in the garden of Tudor House, No. 16 Cheyne Walk, and is perhaps the only survivor of the two thousand said to have been planted in the neighbourhood.
