Professor Smyth found, when he assigned one of his Lectures on Modern History (no. 27) to Law and his exploits, that he got at that time the best exposition for his system in English from Steuart’s Political Economy. The latest summarized statement in English will be found in Lalor’s Cyclopædia of Political Science, vol. ii. (1883), and a good one in Mackay’s Popular Delusions. The general historians of England, more particularly Stanhope, do not tell the story of the great imitatory pageant of the South Sea Scheme without more or less reference to Law. Those of the United States necessarily recount the train of events in Paris, of which Louisiana was the background. A few English monographs, like J. Murray’s French Financiers under Louis XV., and an anonymous book, Law, the Financier, his Scheme and Times (London, 1856), cover specially the great projector’s career; while the best key to his fate at the hands of magazinists will be found in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature (pp. 728, 854), where a popular exposition by Irving is noted, which having appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine (vol. xv. pp. 305, 450), has since been included in the volume of his works called Wolfert’s Roost, and other Papers.
In France the treatment of the great delusion has been frequent. The chief source of later writers has been perhaps Duhautchamp’s Histoire du systéme des finances (à la Haye, 1739), which, with his account of the Visa, makes a full exposition of the rise and fall of the excitement by one who was in the midst of it. His fifth and sixth volumes contain the most complete body of the legislation attending the movement. Forbonnais’ Recherches et considérations sur les finances de France à l’année 1721 (Basle, 1758) is a work of great research, and free from prejudice. The Encyclopédie méthodique (1783) in its essays on commerce and banking contributes valuable aid, and there is a critical review in Ch. Ganilh’s Essai sur le revenu public (Paris, 1806). To these may be added Bailly’s Histoire financière de la France (Paris, 1830); Eugène Daire’s “Notice historique sur Jean Law, ses écrits et les opérations du système,” in his Économistes financiers du dix-huitième siècle (1843); Théodore Vial’s Law, et le système du papier-monnaie de 1716 (1849); A. Cochut’s Law, son système et son époque (1853); J. B. H. R. Capefigue’s Histoire des grandes opérations financières (Paris, 1855), vol. i. p. 116; J. P. Clément’s Portraits historiques (1856); and le Baron Nervo’s Les finances Françaises (Paris, 1863). L. A. Thiers’ encyclopedic article on Law was translated and annotated by Frank S. Fiske as Memoir of the Mississippi Bubble, and published in New York in 1859. This is perhaps the best single book for an English reader, who may find in an appendix to it the account of the Darien Expedition from the Encyclopædia Britannica, and one of the South Sea Scheme from Mackay’s Popular Delusions. Thiers’ French text was at the same time revised and published separately in Paris in 1858. Among other French monographs P. E. Levasseur’s Recherches historiques sur le système de Law (Paris, 1854, and again, 1857) is perhaps the most complete treatment which the subject has yet received. We may further add Jules Michelet’s “Paris et la France sous Law” in the Revue de deux mondes, 1863, vol. xliv.; and the general histories of France, notably Martin’s and Guizot’s, of which there are English versions; the special works on the reign of Louis XV., like De Tocqueville’s; P. E. Lémontey’s Histoire de la Régence (Paris, 1832); J. F. Marmontel’s Régence du duc de Orléans (1805), vol. i. p. 168; and the conglomerate monograph of La Croix, Dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1875), chap. viii. Law finds his most vigorous defender in Louis Blanc, in a chapter of the introduction to his Révolution Française.
The Germans have not made their treatment of the subject very prominent, but reference may be made to J. Heymann’s Law und sein System (1853).
The strong dramatic contrasts of Law’s career have served the English novelist Ainsworth in a story which is known by the projector’s name; but the reader will better get all the contrasts and extraordinary vicissitudes of the social concomitants of the time in the Mémoires of St. Simon, Richelieu, Pollnitz, Barbier, Dangeau, Duclos, and others.
The familiarity of Mr. Davis with the subject has been of great assistance to the Editor in making this survey.
II. The Story of Moncacht-Apé.—The writer of this chapter has, in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 25, 1883, printed a paper on the story of Moncacht-Apé,—an Indian of the Yazoo tribe, who claimed to have made a journey from the Mississippi to the Pacific about the year 1700, which paper has also been printed separately as The Journey of Moncacht-Apé. The story, which first appeared in Le Page du Pratz’ contributions to the Journal œconomique, and first took permanent form in Dumont’s Mémoires in 1753, was made in part to depend for its ethnological interest on the Yazoo marrying a captive Indian, who tells him a story of bearded white men being seen on the Pacific coast. That the Yazoo himself encountered on the Pacific coast a bearded people who came there annually in ships for dye-wood, is derived from the fuller narrative which Le Page du Pratz himself gives in his Histoire de la Louisiane published five years later, in 1758.
Mr. Davis does not find any consideration of the verity of the story till Samuel Engel discussed it in his Mémoires et observations géographiques, published at Lausanne in 1765, which had a chart showing what he conceived to be the route of the Indian, as Le Page du Pratz had traced it, in tracking him from the Missouri to the streams which feed the Columbia River. The story was later examined by Mr. Andrew Stewart in The Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, i. 198 (1829), who accepted the tale as truthful; and Greenhow, in his History of Oregon (Boston, 1844, p. 145), rejects as improbable only the ending as Dumont gives it. In 1881, when M. de Quatrefage rehearsed the story in the Revue d’anthropologie, vol. iv., he argued that the bearded men must have been Japanese. It was this paper of the distinguished French anthropologist which incited Mr. Davis to the study of the narrative; and it is by his discrimination that we are reminded how the story grew to have the suspicious termination, after Le Page had communicated it to Dumont; so that in Mr. Davis’s judgment one is “forced to the unwilling conclusion that the original story of the savage suffered changes at Le Page’s hands.” The story has since been examined by H. H. Bancroft in his Northwest Coast, i. 599 et seq., who sees no reason to doubt the truth of the narrative.
There is an account of the early maps of the country west of Lake Superior and of the headwaters of the Mississippi in Winchell’s Geological Survey of Minnesota, Final Report, vol. i., with a fac-simile of one of 1737. Between 1730 and 1740 Verendrye and his companions explored the country west and northwest of Lake Superior, and reached the Rocky Mountains. Mills, Boundaries of Ontario, p. 75, says he failed to find in the Moniteur, September and November, 1857, the account of Verendrye’s discoveries by Margry, to which Garneau refers.