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'Reader," commences the late Charles Lamb, in one of those charming combinations of wit, philosophy, and quaint individualism, the Essays of Elia,' “ in thy passage from the Bank, where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends, (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself,) to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly, didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals, ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out, a desolation something like Balclutha's. This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here, the quick pulse of gain, and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticoes, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces, deserted or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers; directors seated in form on solemn days, (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry; the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of the Bay of Panama! The long passages hung with buckets, appended in idle row to walls whose substance might defy any short of the last conflagration; with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an 'unsummed heap' for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal,-long since dissipated or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE." It is remarkable with what felicitous accuracy and expressiveness the public will occasionally coin a designation; and never was that power more felicitously exhibited than in the present instance. It was, indeed, and from the first, a bubble; but of such vast dimensions that men were unable to perceive its true character. The glorious play of its colours dazzled their eyes; its magnificent vistas, opening on every side, and all leading to the same conclusion,——

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attracted them into its vortex; as it rose and whirled upwards into that airy region distinguished from time immemorial for the ease with which castles and a variety of other structures are there reared, the soberest individuals grew giddy in the contemplation of the future that awaited them,-one man determined to feed his horses on gold,-when, lo! the gigantic insubstantiality bursts, and in their fall the credulous learn for the first time the nature of the thing on which they have been so long buoyed up. Were it not in its consequences so full of the materials that make tragedy, the South Sea bubble might have been represented on the stage as an admirable farce; satirising more broadly than Comedy would have thought befitting her dignity, or the common sense of probability, the eternal passion for wealth. But, alas! there can be no mirth provoked by the

"I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desɔlate."―OSSIAN.

jest that takes the bread from many a family: we can have no pleasure in witnessing the humour that may be drawn from what has made a nation miserable and degraded in its own eyes.

The origin of the South Sea Company may be traced to Harley, Earl of Oxford, who, to restore the public credit, which had suffered from the removal of the Whigs from power, brought forward his "masterpiece." This was the forming the creditors, to whom was owing the floating debt of the nation, into a company, which should have six per cent. interest insured to them on their debts (in all ten millions), by rendering permanent various duties, such as those on wines, vinegar, tobacco. As a still greater allurement, the South Sea trade, from which great things were at that time expected, was to be secured to them only. The idea was marvellously well received, and the Company incorporated as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain trading to the South Seas and other parts of America." But the King of Spain had his own views of this matter of admitting British merchants into his Transatlantic ports; and the result was, the Company obtained only such advantages as were to be derived from the infamous Assiento, or contract, empowering them to supply Spanish America with negroes from the African continent, and from the permission to send one ship annually with a cargo of goods for sale. Even these advantages, such as they were, had scarcely been granted before they were recalled by the war with Spain, which broke out in 1718, or the year after the first annual ship had sailed. Still there seems to have been an indefinable sort of confidence that something great would yet result from the South Seas; the merchants could not cease to look upon its islands as their Promised Land; consequently the Company's stock still kept up its value, the Company still enjoyed the public confidence-their next movement was to show how worthily. The ministers had conceived the idea that means might still be devised for the formation of a great South Sea trade, which should be so profitable as to pay off all the national incumbrances. Their prompter, it is highly probable, was Sir John Blunt, a leading Director of the Company, who is known to have taken great pains to show ministers the advantage that would result from consolidating all the funds into one, and to have particularly pointed out the effective assistance which his Company might render. An offer even was made by Sir John, on the part of the latter, to liquidate the entire national debt in twenty-six years, if the different funds were formed into one as proposed, if certain commercial privileges were granted, and, lastly, if they were empowered to take in by purchase or subscription both the redeemable and irredeemable national debt, on such terms. as might be agreed on between the Company and the proprietors. Ministers laid the scheme before Parliament. A competition was proposed and agreed to. The Bank of England sent in a proposal; which so alarmed the Directors of the South Sea Company that they reconsidered theirs, and prepared one still more favourable than either their own previous one or that of the Bank. The latter, on its part, imitated the Company's example, and ultimately four plans lay upon the table of the House of Commons for consideration. The Directors of the Company had said they would obtain the preference, cost what it would, and they made good their word. Leave was given to bring in a bill founded on

their proposals. It may now be worth while to inquire what the Directors really intended; and perhaps the best answer is to be found in their private proceedings at this moment, which are known to us by means of the subsequent Parliamentary inquiry. The books now presented a total sum of above a million and a quarter of money, upon account of stock to the amount of 574,500l., which was there stated to have been sold on various occasions, and at prices varying from 150 to 325 per cent. Of this professed 574,500l. worth of stock, only about 30,000l. was real, all the remainder was assigned, without value received of any kind, to the Directors, or the members of Government, whom it was desirable to bribe. Thus 50,000l. stood against the Earl of Sunderland's name; 10,000/. against the Duchess of Kendal, the King's ill-favoured German mistress; 10,0001 to the Countess of Platen, a lady enjoying a similar position, and a like sum to her two nieces; 30,000l. to Mr. Secretary (of State) Craggs; 10,000l. to Mr. Charles Stanhope, one of the Secretaries of the Treasury; and some large sums by a more circuitous mode to Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who introduced the propositions to Parliament. Some of our readers may not readily perceive the immediate effect of this arrangement; we offer, therefore, a slight illustration. The day before the Parliament gave leave for the bringing in of the bill referred to, the Company's stock stood at 130; almost immediately after it rose by great leaps to 300. Supposing Mr. Secretary Craggs, for instance, to be satisfied with the profit now within his reach, the cashier perhaps of the Company sold out his stock at the rate of 300 per cent., kept 130 per cent. for the Company (thus, for the first time, making its nominal subscriptions real), and handed over the difference, 170 per cent. on 10,000, to Mr. Secretary Craggs. On the other hand, had the stock, instead of rising from 130, fallen, what then? Why, then Mr. Secretary Craggs would have consoled himself with the reflection that it could not sink below its cost to him, which was simply-nothing. During the progress of the bill, the stock continuing to rise, the Directors made two more subscriptions, or, in other words, repeated the manœuvre above described. On the last of these occasions Mr. Aislabie's name was down for 70,000/., Mr. Craggs, senior, for 659,000l., the Earl of Sunderland for 160,000l., and Mr. Stanhope for 47,000l. The bill passed, and some time after the stock rose in value to above 1000 per cent. The unheard-of profits that it was in the power of the prime movers in this affair to make, under such circumstances, are very evident; though it is highly probable that some even of them were carried away by their own schemes, and, venturing too long, shared in the general loss at the last. To produce the continual rise in the value of their stock, means as infamous as the ends which some at least of the Directors had in view were adopted. Markets of inestimable value were every day being dis covered in those wonderful South Seas, mines of incalculable depth full of the precious metals. Fifty per cent. dividends, in short, were the least that the holders of the stock were to expect. Landlords sold their estates, merchants neglected their establishments, and tradesmen their shops,-to flock to the Exchange and vest their all in the Company's stock; and to find there a promiscuous crowd of noblemen and parsons, brokers and jobbers, country squires and ladies, as eager as themselves in the same pursuit.

Swift, likening 'Change Alley to a South Sea gulf, says—

"Subscribers here by thousands float,

And jostle one another down,
Each paddling in his leaky boat,

And here they fish for gold, and drown.

Now buried in the depths below,
Now mounted up to heaven again,
They reel and stagger to and fro,

At their wits' end, like drunken men.

Meantime secure on Garraway cliffs,
A savage race,* by shipwrecks fed,
Lie waiting for the founder'd skiffs,

And strip the bodies of the dead."

The original speculation became at last insufficient to the demands of the public to lose its money. Associations of every conceivable kind, and many which it may be safely asserted none of us could now conceive of were not the facts before us, started up in imitation of their great parent. Brought forward under more favourable circumstances, some of these would have deserved the encouragement they now, undeserving, met with; such, for instance, as some of the great fisheries proposed, the fire-assurance companies, silk and cotton manufactories, &c. &c. But of the major part we may say they were as extravagant as the period in which they were proposed, and of some that they were as ludicrously absurd as the heated imaginations of those for whose especial benefit they were intended. In the list of bubbles declared illegal, when the evil became too imminent for the Government to leave it alone, we find those for trading in human hair, for furnishing funerals to any part of Great Britain, and for a wheel for the perpetual motion. Maitland also mentions, among his general list of one hundred and fifty-six bubbles, those for an Arcadian colony, for feeding hogs, for curing the gout and stone, for furnishing merchants with watches, for making butter from beech-trees, for an engine to remove the South-Sea House into Moorfields, for making deal boards of saw-dust, for a scheme to teach wise men to cast nativities; and above all was one with a gloriously expressive title, to extract silver from lead, for the knaves and the fools could each read it in their own way, and be equally pleased with it.

During the King's absence, even the Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne, joined in the general scramble that was going on, and put down his name as governor of some Welsh copper company, although warned that he was subjecting himself to a prosecution in so doing. He soon made 40,000l., and then withdrew in time to avoid the evil that had been pointed out. These prosecutions were carried on at the instigation of the South Sea Company, who, as it has been observed, "desiring to monopolise all the folly and all the money of the nation," obtained writs of scire facias against the managers of the minor bubbles, and thus destroyed most of them. Their very proceedings, however, it is probable, caused attention to be paid to the basis of all these speculations, and most alarming was the result. Many began now to see very clearly that the value of the South Sea stock really rested on nothing but the delusion of its supporters. At * Swift is referring to the brokers, &c., of the famous meeting-place known as "Garraway's.”

The next

the beginning of August the price was quoted at a thousand. The bubble had now reached its highest point, and began to descend. Suspicion first became raised apparently by the means adopted in making out the share-lists for the different subscriptions, with what reason we have already shown. circumstance was of a much more startling nature: it was generally reported that Sir John Blunt, the chairman, and some others, had sold out. By the 2nd of September the stock had fallen to seven hundred. The Directors, to allay the alarm, called a meeting at Merchant Tailors' Hall on the 8th. The room was filled to suffocation. Sir John Fellowes, the sub-governor, was made Chairman. Many Directors spoke, inculcating union, and others in praise of the Directors' conduct. A Mr. Hungerford, a member of parliament, with thoughtful kindness, observed, "They had enriched the whole nation, and he hoped they had not forgotten themselves." The Duke of Portland wondered how anybody could be dissatisfied; and, in short, the Directors had it all their own way. That same evening, however, the stock fell to six hundred and forty, and the next day to five hundred and forty. Bankers, brokers, and merchants began to break daily, and many, in utter despair of redeeming anything, even character, fled the country, each involving hundreds of lesser houses with him. Gay, the poet, was a sufferer, under peculiar circumstances. The younger Craggs had at an early period made him a present of some stock, which, as the bubble expanded, became nominally worth 20,0007. He was then begged to sell it, or even a portion of it large enough to secure him, in Fenton's words, " a clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day." But the true gambling spirit had infected the poet as well as everybody else: it should be all or nothing; so it was—nothing. For some time afterward Gay's life was in danger, so deeply did he take to heart his loss, and perhaps his folly. The aspect of affairs was now so dangerous, that the King was sent for from Hanover; and Walpole, who from the first, be it said to his credit, had in the most earnest and impressive manner prophesied the result, was desired to come up from his country seat to London, and use his influence with the Bank of England to assist the falling Company by circulating a number of their bonds. The Bank at first consented; but afterwards, seeing more clearly the desperate condition of the Company, drew back, and gave a decided refusal. It was a curious coincidence that, whilst at that moment a Director was scarcely safe in the streets from the vengeance of the populace, Law, the projector of the great Mississippi scheme in France, was flying for his life from the people whom he had beggared. But error and knavery, however similar in their results, must not be confounded together: Law gave the most decided proofs that the miserable love of lucre had not been the instigating motive with him. The refusal of the Bank of England to risk their property in the vain endeavour to save the Company was a last and finishing blow. It burst the bubble. The stock soon fell to one hundred and thirty-five.

It would be impossible to describe the extent of the confusion, the misery, the utter loosening of all the bonds of confidence, which more than any laws keep up the harmonious movements of the social machinery, or the universal desire for vengeance that pervaded all classes, now that the delusion had passed from before their eyes. Gibbon, the historian, whose grandfather was one of the Directors, has led the way in describing the injustice of the people and the parliament at

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