Keeping common gaming-houses, 8.
We have now arrived at a grand æra of villainy, the golden harvest of scheming, in which Mr.
Law acted the first part in France. A person under the signature of Publicus, in the Thursday's Journal of December 17, 1719, very justly observes: "If any of the days of us or our forefathers might be called the projecting age, I think this is the time. If ever there was a nation that had been 23 years ruining itself and recovered in a moment, this is the time. If ever a government paid its debts without money, and exchanged all the cash in the kingdom for bits of paper, which had neither anybody to pay them for, or any intrinsic fund to pay themselves, this is the time. If ever a credit was raised without a foundation, and built up to a height that not only was likely to fall, but indeed was impossible to stand, this is the time."
Speaking of Mr. Law, he says, "First, he has entirely restored credit in France; or, as it may be said, he has planted credit in a soil where credit never could thrive, and never did thrive before; I mean in a tyrannic absolute government, a thing inconsistent with credit, and the very name of it; for when was ever credit established to any degree, where the Sovereign was able to seize upon the foundation on which it stood, by his absolute power, and at his pleasure.
"2dly, He has established such a bank, and so fortified it with an established settlement, and on such a stock, as nothing can come up to it in
the world, except only the Banks of London and Amsterdam.
"3dly, He has erected a Company immense and inimitable on a trifling fund, and the trifle made up of the most precarious things that could be then imagined, being State bills, Town-house rents, and public funds, which in their own esteem were not at that time to be rated at above 35 or 40 per cent. nor would they have fetched more to have been sold then in open market; and these has he brought up to be worth 2000l. per cent. in the same market where they were under 40 per cent. before. The man that has done all this was here but a contemptible person, a Silversmith's son at Edinburgh, then a rake, then a soldier, then a kind of bully, then a murderer; he was tried at the Old Bailey for killing Mr. Wilson, commonly called Beau Wilson, in a duel; he was condemned to be hanged, but found means to break out of Newgate; some say he got out by a silver key, and from thence made his escape into France: there he lived without character and without employment, till entering into the schemes which he has since laid open, and talking freely of them, it came to the ears of the Regent, who employing some men to talk with him, and they finding his head turned for great projects, he was heard by more considerable persons, and finally by the Regent himself, with whom he established these just maxims as fundamentals;
namely: That a fund of credit was equal to a fund of money. That credit might be raised upon personal funds, not upon the publick, because the power was absolute. Upon these foundations he first erected the Royal bank; which, having been done by a subscription, and having a sufficient fund in specie to answer all the bills on demand, began to take, and having stood several severe shocks from the attempts of merchants and others to ruin its reputation, established itself upon the punctual discharge of its first credit, till by time it increased to such a magnitude as we now see it, being able to pay bills as was tried by its enemy for a million and a quarter, sterling, in one day. This Bank, being thus past the first hazards, stands too fast for the power of art to shake it; and immense sums being lodged with them, their payments are much safer than the money in any man's pocket.
"This raised Mr. Law's fame to the pitch it is now at, and set him above the power of all his enemies. From thence he grounded his Mississippi project, got it filled up, joined it to the East-India Company; undertook the whole coinage, embraced several other projects, as a Royal fishery, the Tobacco farm, and at last the trade to Norway for naval stores, deals, timber, &c.
"It is true that a stock advanced to 2000 per cent. may undertake any thing; but depend upon it, a stock advanced to 2000 per cent. upon no