Men's faces shone with excitement and hope. The dormant hordes of misers crept out of their napkins and sepulchral strong-boxes into the warm air of the golden time. The mason's chisel chirped all over the kingdom, and the shipbuilders' * hammers rang all round the coast; corn was plenty, money became a drug, labor wealth, and poverty and discontent vanished from the face of the land. Adventure seemed all wings, and no lumbering carcass to clog it. New joint-stock companies were started in crowds as larks rise and darken the air in winter;** hundreds came to nothing, but hundreds stood, and of these nearly all reached a premium, small in some cases, high in most, fabulous in some; and the ease with which the first calls for cash on the multitudinous shares were met argued the vast resources that had hitherto slumbered in the nation for want of promising investments suited to the variety of human likings and judgments. The mind can hardly conceive any species of earthly enterprise that was not fitted with a company, oftener with a dozen, and with fifty or sixty where the proposed road to metal was direct. Of these the mines of Mexico still kept the front rank, but not to the exclusion of European, Australian and African ore.
* Two hundred new vessels are said to have been laid on the
stocks in one year.
** In two years 624 new companies were projected.
That masterpiece of fiction, “the Prospectus,” * diffused its gorgeous light far and near, lit up the dark mine, and showed the minerals shining and the jewels peeping; shone broad over the smiling fields, soon to be plowed, reaped, and mowed by machinery; and even illumined the depths of the sea, whence the buried treasures of ancient and modern times were about to be recovered by the Diving-bell Company.
* There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling
about, whose creed seems to be that a little camel, to be
known, must be examined and compared with other quadrupeds,
but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a
penny-a-liner's inner consciousness, and to be rated and
ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the
microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the
glass from the learned judge's method in Biography, the
learned historian's method in History, and the daily
chronicler's method in dressing res gestoe for a journal,
this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate,
not based on comparison, so that all his blindfold
vituperation of a noble art is chimera, not reasoning; it
is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic. This is
to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl
back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients,
that kept the world dark so many centuries. It is [Greek]
versus Induction. “[Greek],” ladies, is “divination by means
of an ass's skull.” A pettifogger's skull, however, will
serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten
with an insane itch for scribbling about things so
infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts. Avoid this
sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the
Baconian method! Then you will find that all uninspired
narratives are more or less inexact, and that one, and one
only, Fiction proper, has the honesty to antidote its errors
by professing inexactitude. You will find that the
Historian, Biographer, Novelist, and Chronicler are all
obliged to paint upon their data with colors the
imagination alone can supply, and all do it—alive or dead.
You will find that Fiction, as distinguished from neat
mendacity, has not one form upon earth, but a dozen. You
will find the most habitually, willfully, and inexcusably
inaccurate, with the means of accuracy under its nose, that
form of fiction called “anonymous criticism,” political and
literary; the most equivocating, perhaps, is the
“imaginavit,” better known at Lincoln's Inn as the
“affidavit.” In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and
tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and
most sparkling is the Advertisement, but the grandest,
ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely
the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by
potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear God, worship
Mammon, revere big wigs right or wrong, and never read
romances.
One mine was announced with a “vein of ore as pure and solid as a tin flagon.”
In another the prospectus offered mixed advantages. The ore lay in so romantic a situation, and so thick, that the eye could be regaled with a heavenly landscape, while the foot struck against neglected lumps of gold weighing from two pounds to fifty.
This put the Bolanos mine on its mettle, and it announced, “not mines, but mountains of silver.” Here, then, men might chip metal instead of painfully digging it. With this, up went the shares till they reached 500 premium.
Tialpuxahua was done at 199 premium.
Anglo Mexican 10 pounds paid, went to 158 pounds premium.
United Mexican 10 “ “ , “ 155 pounds ”
Columbian 10 “ “ , “ 82 pounds ”
But the Real del Monte, a mine of longer standing, on which 70 pounds was paid up, went to 550 premium, and at a later period, for I am not following the actual sequence of events, reached the enormous height of 1350 premium.
The Prospectus of the Equitable Loan Company lamented in paragraph one the imposition practiced on the poor, and denounced the pawnbrokers' 15 per cent. In paragraph four it promised 40 per cent to its shareholders.