This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed it—how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize." Dread word, REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris, ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.
As the "system" collapsed in France, it acquired vogue in England, where, also, it originated in the desire to get rid of the public debt by brilliant finance instead of the homely and troublesome method of paying it. In London, besides the original South Sea Company which began the frenzy, there were started in the course of a few months about two hundred joint-stock schemes, many of which, as given in Anderson's "History of Commerce," are of almost incredible absurdity. The sum called for by these projects was three hundred millions of pounds sterling, which was more than the value of all the land in Great Britain. Shares in Sir Richard Steele's "fish-pool for bringing fresh fish to London" brought one hundred and sixty pounds a share! Men paid seventy pounds each for "permits," which gave them merely the privilege of subscribing to a sail-cloth manufacturing company not yet formed. There was, indeed, a great trade in "permits" to subscribe to companies only planned. Here are a few of the schemes: for raising hemp in Pennsylvania; "Puckle's machine gun;" settling the Bahamas; "wrecks to be fished for on the Irish coast;" horse and cattle insurance; "insurance and improvement of children's fortunes;" "insurance of losses by servants;" "insurance against theft and robbery;" insuring remittances; "to make salt-water fresh;" importing walnut-trees from Virginia; improving the breed of horses; purchasing forfeited estates; making oil from sunflowers; planting mulberry-trees and raising silk-worms; extracting silver from lead; making quicksilver malleable; capturing pirates; "for importing a number of large jackasses from Spain in order to propagate a larger kind of mules;" trading in human hair; "for fatting of hogs;" "for the encouragement of the industrious;" perpetual motion; making pasteboard; furnishing funerals.
There was even a company formed and shares sold for carrying out an "undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." The word "puts," now so familiar in Wall Street, appears in these transactions of 1720. "Puts and refusals" were sold in vast amounts. The prices paid for shares during the half year of this mania were as remarkable as the schemes themselves. South Sea shares of a hundred pounds par value reached a thousand pounds. It was a poor share that did not sell at five times its original price. As in France, so in England, the long heads, like Sir Robert Walpole and Alexander Pope, began to think of "realizing" when they had gained a thousand per cent. or so upon their ventures; and, in a very few days, realizing, in its turn, became a mania; and all those paper fortunes shrunk and crumpled into nothingness.
So many caricatures of these events appeared in Amsterdam and London during the year 1720 that the collection in the British Museum, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty-five years, contains more than a hundred specimens. I have myself eighty, several of which include from six to twenty-four distinct designs. Like most of the caricatures of that period, they are of great size, and crowded with figures, each bearing its label of words, with a long explanation in verse or prose at the bottom of the sheet. As a rule, they are destitute of the point that can make a satirical picture interesting after the occasion is past. In one we see the interior of an Exchange filled with merchants running wildly about, each uttering words appropriate to the situation: "To-day I have gained ten thousand!" "Who has money to lend at two per cent.?" "A strait-jacket is what I shall want;" "Damned is this wind business." This picture, which originated in Amsterdam, is called "The Wind-buyers paid in Wind," and it contains at the bottom three columns of explanatory verse in Dutch, of which the following is the purport:
John Law, Wind Monopolist. (Amsterdam, 1720.)
"Law loquitur. The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation. Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry. Less rapidly turn the sails of the windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish enterprises."
"Come, gentlemen, weavers, peasants, tailors! Whoever has relied on wind for his profit can find his picture here. They rave like madmen. See the French, the English, the Hebrew, and Jack of Bremen! Hear what a scream the absurd Dutch are making on the exchange of Europe! There is Fortune throwing down some charming wishes to silly mortals, while virtue, art, and intellect are despised and impoverished in the land; shops and counting-houses are empty; trade is ruined. All this is Quincampoix!"
The Dutch caricaturists recurred very often to the windy character of the share business. In several of their works we see a puffy wind-god blowing up pockets to a great size, inflating share-bags, and wafting swiftly along vehicles with spacious sails. The bellows play a conspicuous and not always decorous part. Jean Law is exhibited as a "wind monopolist." In one picture he appears assisting Atlas and others to bear up great globes of wind. Kites are flying and windmills revolving in several pictures. Pigeons fly away with shares in their bills. The hunchback who served as a walking desk is repeated many times. The Tower of Babel, the mad-house, the hospital, the whirligig, a garden maze, the lottery wheel, the drum, the magic lantern, the soap-bubble, the bladder, dice, the swing—whatever typifies pretense, uncertainty, or confusion was brought into the service. One Dutch broadsheet (sixteen inches by twenty), now before me, contains fifty-four finely executed designs, each of which burlesques a scene in Law's career, or a device of his finance, the whole making a pack of "wind cards for playing a game of wind."