JOHN LAW.
Copied from the head of a full-length portrait in Het Groote Taferel. Rigaud’s portrait of Law is engraved in Alphonse Courtois’ Histoire des banques en France, 2d ed. (Paris, 1881). Cf. also the print in Mouffle d’Angerville’s Vie privée de Louis XV. (Londres, 1781), vol. 1. p. 53.
I. Law and the Mississippi Bubble.—The literature of the Mississippi Scheme is extensive, and includes the relations of Law’s system to general monetary science. The Mississippi excitement instigated the South Sea Scheme in England. Holland, also, was largely affected, and gave, as well as England and France, considerable additions to the contemporary mass of brochures which grew out of these financial revolutions. Law’s own pleas and expositions, as issued in pamphlets, are the central sources of his own views or pretensions, and are included in the Œuvres de J. Law, published at Paris in 1790. These writings are again found in Daire’s Économistes financiers; where will also be met the Essai politique sur le commerce of Melon, Law’s secretary,—a production which Levasseur styles an allegorical history of the system,—and the Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce of Dutot, another of Law’s partisans, who was one of the cashiers of the Company of the Indies, and undertook to correct what he thought misconceptions in Melon; and he was in turn criticised by an opponent of Law, Paris Duverney, in a little book printed at the Hague in 1740, as Examen du livre intitulé, etc.
Law’s proposal for his Mississippi Company is also included in a Dutch collection of similar propositions, printed at the Hague in 1721 as Verzameling van alle de projecten en conditien van de compagnien van assuratie, etc.
There are various Lettres patentes, Édits, Arrests, Ordonnances, etc., issued separately by the French Government, some of which are included in a volume published at Amsterdam in 1720,—Recueil d’arrests et autres pièces pour l’établissement de la compagnie d’occident. Others will be found, by title at least, in the Recueil général des anciennes lois Françoises (Paris, 1830), vol. xxi., with the preambles given at length of some of the more important. Neither of these collections is complete, nor does that of Duhautchamp take their place; but all three, doubtless, contain the chief of such documents.
A few of the contemporary publications may be noted:—