Volume 2 > Half-Volume 4

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legal tender. And to add to all this confusion and
distress, the repositories of the bank were sealed up
the same day, under pretence of examining the books,
but in reality to prevent the specie from being paid
away in exchange for notes. At last, after the first
moments of alarm and outrage were over, the regent
ventured to resume those expressions of confidence
towards Law which he had been compelled to with-
hold from him for a time; he received him in his own
box at the opera, and gave him a guard to protect
his hotel from the insult of the exasperated populace.
The infamous Dubois, who had enriched himself by
his speculations during the height of the Mississippi
madness, now united with Law to expel Argenson
from the cabinet; and the regent, whose character,
though intrepid, was not without its weak points,
was persuaded at their instigation to take the seals
from his faithful minister, and bestow them upon
Agnesseau, who tamely resumed the high office,
from which he had been expelled by the very men
to whose influence he now beheld himself indebted
for his second elevation.
Nothing could now save the system of the great
financier; his billets and actions were for ever
stripped of their value in the eye of the public; and
the most expedient measure that could now be
adopted with regard to them, was to withdraw them
as promptly as possible from circulation. To de-
molish in the most prudent manner the vast structure
reared by his own labour was now the highest praise
to which Law could aspire. By a series of arbitrary
financial operations, which it would be tedious here
to relate, the public creditors were reduced to the
utmost distress, the national debt annihilated, and
the whole affairs of the kingdom thrown into the
utmost perplexity. " Thus ended," to use the words
of Voltaire, "that astonishing game of chance played
by an unknown foreigner against a whole nation."
Its original success stimulated various individuals
to attempt imitations of it�among which the most
famous was the South Sea bubble of England, which
entailed disgrace and ruin on many thousands of
families. It would be doing injustice to Law's
character were we to view him as the sole author of
these misfortunes: his views were liberal beyond the
spirit of the times in which he lived; he had unques-
tionably the real commercial interests of his adopted
foster-country at heart; he did not proceed on specu-
lation alone; on the contrary, his principles were to
a certain degree the very same as those the adoption
of which has raised Britain to her present commercial
greatness, and given an impulse to trade throughout
the world, such as was never witnessed in the trans-
actions of ancient nations. His error lay in over-
estimating the strength and breadth of the foundation
on which his gigantic superstructure rested. Un-
questionably in his cooler moments he never contem-
plated carrying the principle of public credit to the
enormous and fatal length to which he was afterwards
driven by circumstances; it was the unbounded con-
fidence of the public mind, prompted by the desire
of gain and the miraculous effects of the system in its
earliest development�the enthusiasm of that mind,
transported beyond all bounds of moderation and
forbearance by a first success eclipsing its most san-
guine expectations, realizing to thousands of indivi-
duals the possession of wealth to an amount beyond
all that they had ever conceived in imagination�the
contagious example of the first fortunate speculators
intoxicated with success, and fired to the most ex-
travagant and presumptuous anticipations, by which
men can be lured into acts of blinded infatuation or
thoughtless folly�it was these circumstances, we say,
over which Law had necessarily little control, that
converted his projects into the bane of those for
whom they were at first calculated to serve as a
wholesome antidote.
Law was in fact more intent on following out his
idea than aggrandizing his fortunes. Riches, in-
fluence, honours, were showered upon him in the
necessity of things; the man who had given birth to
the wealth of a whole kingdom, whose schemes had
for a while invested all who entered into them with
imaginary treasures�by whose single mind the work-
ings of that complicated engine which had already
produced such dazzling results as seemed to justify
the most extravagant anticipations of the future, were
comprehended and directed�must have risen during
the existence of that national delusion to the highest
pinnacle of personal wealth and influence, and might,
though only endowed with a mere tithe of the fore-
casting sagacity of Law, have provided for his retreat,
and secured a sufficient competency at least beyond
the possibility of loss or hazard, as thousands in fact
did upon the strength of his measure. But Law, in
deluding others, laboured under still stronger delu-
sion himself; like the fabled Frankenstein, he had
created a monster whose power he had not at first
calculated, and the measure of which he now found
he could not prescribe, and he awaited the result
with mingled feelings of hope, fear, and distrust.
It was the ignorant interference of others with his
own mysterious processes which finally determined
the fatal direction of those energies which he had
called into being, and which he might have been able,
if not to restrain, at least to direct in another and less
ruinous manner. We are far from professing our-
selves the unqualified apologists of our enterprising
countryman. It was criminal in him to make use
of remedies of such a desperate kind as those to
which he had recourse when his system began to
stagger under its first revulsions; doubtless his
temptations were strong, but, invested as he was
with authority, it was in his power to have resisted
them, and adopted a less empirical mode of treat-
ment. In estimating his moral character, it does
not appear to us that his renouncing Protestantism,
under the circumstances in which he was placed,
ought to weigh much against the uprightness of his
intentions. Religion was with him a matter of in-
ferior moment. In his previous life he had mani-
fested no symptoms of piety; an utter stranger to the
faith and power of the gospel, Protestantism was
superior to any other ism with him, just in as far as
it favoured his worldly policy. He believed himself
possessed of means to elevate a whole nation in the
scale of wealth and power, with all their attendant
benign influences, and to give an impulse by means
of the fortunes of France to the destinies of the human
species: and is it to be supposed that this considera-
tion, thrown into the balance, should not have caused
that scale in which was placed a mere nominal pro-
fession of a religion�the truth of which he neither
knew nor respected�to kick the beam?
Before resuming the thread of our biography, let
us for a moment compare the financial catastrophe
we have now been considering with that of the as-
signats of revolutionary France, and the celebrated
crisis of the Bank of England in 1797: we shall dis-
cover striking points of resemblance in the circum-
stances which led to these events, and draw from
their comparison a few important truths. Credit is
founded on the supposition of future value; it is this
prospective value which is made to circulate as if it
were existing value, in the form of a bank-note.
Law founded his schemes upon the great basis of
credit, which again he proposed to create by the
profits arising from speculation in the shares of his