Young harlots, too, from Drury Lane,
Approach the ’Change in coaches
To fool away the gold they gain
By their impure debauches.
At Leicester House, and in all the great houses, lords and ladies talked of nothing but reports, subscriptions and transfers, and every day saw new companies born, almost every hour. Fortunes were made in a night, and people who had been indigent rose suddenly to great wealth. Stock-jobbers and their wives, Hebrew and Gentile, were suddenly admitted to the most exclusive circles, and aped the manners and the vices of the aristocracy who courted them for what they could get. They drove in gorgeous coaches, decked with brand-new coats of arms, which afforded much opportunity for ridicule. Only the mob, who hooted them in the streets, was not complaisant.
THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE.
From an old Cartoon.
Some of the companies hawked about were for the most preposterous objects, such as companies “To make salt water fresh,” “To build hospitals for bastard children,” “For making oil from sunflower seeds,” “For fattening of hogs,” for “Trading in human hair,” for “Extracting silver from lead,” for “Building of ships against pirates,” for “Importing a number of large jackasses from Spain,” for “A wheel with a perpetual motion,” and, strangest of all, for “An undertaking which shall in due time be revealed”.[111] For this last scheme the trusting subscribers were to pay down two guineas, “and hereafter to receive a share of one hundred, with the disclosure of the object”. So gullible was the public, that one thousand subscriptions were paid in the course of the morning. The projector levanted in the evening, and the object of the undertaking was revealed.
The disenchantment was not long in coming. The South Sea directors, jealous of all who came in opposition to their schemes, began legal proceedings against several bogus companies, and obtained orders and writs of scire facias against them. These companies speedily collapsed, but in their fall they dragged down the fabric of speculation on which the South Sea Company itself was reared. The spirit of distrust was excited, and holders became anxious to convert their bonds into money. By the end of September South Sea stock had fallen from 1,000 to 150. The panic was general. Money was called up from the distant counties to London, goldsmiths were applied to, and Walpole used his influence with the Bank of England—but all to no purpose, so great was the disproportion between paper promises and the coin wherewith to pay. Public confidence had been shaken, and could not be restored. The news of the crash in Paris, caused by the failure of Law’s Mississippi scheme, completed the general ruin. Everywhere were heard lamentations and execrations. The Hebrew stock-jobbers and their wives made their exit from English society as suddenly as they had entered it, and for at least a century were no more seen in noble mansions.