and otherwise.[1] The phrensy of the year 1720, therefore, we may say, was only the height and crisis of a fever that had been long at work in the public mind. And, although it is commonly assumed that it was the temporary success of Law's Mississippi conjuration in France which provoked the delirium and credulity of our own South Sea Company speculators, the truth rather appears to be that the example of the French project only suggested to the contrivers of the scheme for paying off the English national debt a method of proceeding by which, under that pretence, they could turn to the best account for themselves a general pre-disposition of their fellow-countrymen that prepared them for being readily duped by such extravagant promises of sudden wealth, and that would have certainly exploded about the same time in some other fashion, but with results nearly the same, if neither the South Sea scheme nor the Mississippi scheme had ever been thought of. And, after all, as we have observed, the calamitous effects of the madness were rather individual and immediate than permanent or general. There was little if any absolute destruction of capital; the whole mischief consisted in a most quick and violent shifting of property from one hand to another; many rich persons were made suddenly poor, but many poor persons were also made suddenly rich; and, if some old families were thrown to the ground, some new ones were at the same time raised from the ground and established in their places. Not a social revolution, certainly, which it would be desirable to see often repeated—on the contrary, an interruption of the natural, even course of things fraught with much temporary inconvenience and misery—a wrench or shake given to the body politic which it cannot but feel sharply at the moment, but by which, for all that, its general health will suffer nothing, Nay, the shock may do good in the long run rather than harm. In the present instance, that would appear to have been the case. The catastrophe of the South Sea delusion—the
- ↑ See 9 Anne, c. 6, s. 57, &c., and 10 Anne, c. 19 (c. 26 in common editions), s. 111, &c. See also 5 Geo. 1. c. 9 (passed in 1718).
