Part 35 (2/2)

Almost contemporaneously, numerous joint-stock companies were formed, and directed toward schemes of internal industry. The small capitalists that had sold out of the Navy Five per Cents threw themselves into them all, and being bona fide speculators, drew hundreds in their train. Adventure, however, was at first restrained in some degree by the state of the currency. It was low, and rested on a singularly sound basis. Mr. Peel's Currency Bill had been some months in operation; by its princ.i.p.al provision the Bank of England was compelled on and after a certain date to pay gold for its notes on demand. The bank, antic.i.p.ating a consequent rush for gold, had collected vast quant.i.ties of sovereigns, the new coin; but the rush never came, for a mighty simple reason. Gold is convenient in small sums, but a burden and a nuisance in large ones. It betrays its presence and invites robbers; it is a bore to lug it about, and a fearful waste of golden time to count it. Men run upon gold only when they have reason to distrust paper. But Mr. Peel's Bill, instead of damaging Bank of England paper, solidified it, and gave the nation a just and novel confidence in it. Thus, then, the large h.o.a.rd of gold, fourteen to twenty millions, that the caution of the bank directors had acc.u.mulated in their coffers, remained uncalled for. But so large an abstraction from the specie of the realm contracted the provincial circulation. The small business of the country moved in fetters, so low was the metal currency. The country bankers pet.i.tioned government for relief, and government, listening to representations that were no doubt supported by facts, and backed by other interests, tampered with the principle of Mr. Peel's Bill, and allowed the country bankers to issue 1 pound and 2 pound notes for eleven years to come.

To this step there were but six dissentients in the House of Commons, so little was its importance seen or its consequences foreseen. This piece of inconsistent legislation removed one restraint, irksome but salutary, from commercial enterprise at a moment when capital was showing some signs of a feverish agitation. Its immediate consequences were very encouraging to the legislator; the country bankers sowed the land broadcast with their small paper, and this, for the cause above adverted to, took _pro tem._ the place of gold, and was seldom cashed at all except where silver was wanted. On this enlargement of the currency the arms of the nation seemed freed, enterprise shot ahead unshackled, and unwonted energy and activity thrilled in the veins of the kingdom. The rise in the prices of all commodities which followed, inevitable consequence of every increase in the currency, whether real or fict.i.tious, was in itself adverse to the working cla.s.ses; but the vast and numerous enterprises that were undertaken, some in the country itself, some in foreign parts, to which English workmen were conveyed, raised the price of labor higher still in proportion; so no cla.s.s was out of the sun.

Men's faces shone with excitement and hope. The dormant hordes of misers crept out of their napkins and sepulchral strong-boxes into the warm air of the golden time. The mason's chisel chirped all over the kingdom, and the s.h.i.+pbuilders'* hammers rang all round the coast; corn was plenty, money became a drug, labor wealth, and poverty and discontent vanished from the face of the land. Adventure seemed all wings, and no lumbering carca.s.s to clog it. New joint-stock companies were started in crowds as larks rise and darken the air in winter;**

hundreds came to nothing, but hundreds stood, and of these nearly all reached a premium, small in some cases, high in most, fabulous in some; and the ease with which the first calls for cash on the mult.i.tudinous shares were met argued the vast resources that had hitherto slumbered in the nation for want of promising investments suited to the variety of human likings and judgments. The mind can hardly conceive any species of earthly enterprise that was not fitted with a company, oftener with a dozen, and with fifty or sixty where the proposed road to metal was direct. Of these the mines of Mexico still kept the front rank, but not to the exclusion of European, Australian and African ore.

* Two hundred new vessels are said to have been laid on the stocks in one year.

** In two years 624 new companies were projected.

That masterpiece of fiction, ”the Prospectus,”* diffused its gorgeous light far and near, lit up the dark mine, and showed the minerals s.h.i.+ning and the jewels peeping; shone broad over the smiling fields, soon to be plowed, reaped, and mowed by machinery; and even illumined the depths of the sea, whence the buried treasures of ancient and modern times were about to be recovered by the Diving-bell Company.

* There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling about, whose creed seems to be that a little camel, to be known, must be examined and compared with other quadrupeds, but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared _inter se._ Applying the microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the gla.s.s from the learned judge's method in Biography, the learned historian's method in History, and the daily chronicler's method in dressing _res gestoe_ for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate, not based on comparison, so that all his blindfold vituperation of a n.o.ble art is chimera, not reasoning; it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic. This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients, that kept the world dark so many centuries. It is [Greek]

versus Induction. ”[Greek],” ladies, is ”divination by means of an a.s.s's skull.” A pettifogger's skull, however, will serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten with an insane itch for scribbling about things so infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts. Avoid this sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the Baconian method! Then you will find that all uninspired narratives are more or less inexact, and that one, and one only, Fiction proper, has the honesty to antidote its errors by professing inexact.i.tude. You will find that the Historian, Biographer, Novelist, and Chronicler are all obliged _to paint upon their data_ with colors the imagination alone can supply, and all do it--alive or dead.

You will find that Fiction, as distinguished from neat mendacity, has not one form upon earth, but a dozen. You will find the most habitually, willfully, and inexcusably inaccurate, with the means of accuracy under its nose, that form of fiction called ”anonymous criticism,” political and literary; the most equivocating, perhaps, is the ”imaginavit,” better known at Lincoln's Inn as the ”affidavit.” In the article of exaggeration, the mildest and tamest are perhaps History and the Novel, the boldest and most sparkling is the Advertis.e.m.e.nt, but the grandest, ablest, most gorgeous and plausibly exaggerating is surely the grave commercial prospectus, drawn up and signed by potent, grave and reverend seniors, who fear G.o.d, wors.h.i.+p Mammon, revere big wigs right or wrong, and never read romances.

One mine was announced with a ”vein of ore as pure and solid as a tin flagon.”

In another the prospectus offered mixed advantages. The ore lay in so romantic a situation, and so thick, that the eye could be regaled with a heavenly landscape, while the foot struck against neglected lumps of gold weighing from two pounds to fifty.

This put the Bolanos mine on its mettle, and it announced, ”not mines, but mountains of silver.” Here, then, men might chip metal instead of painfully digging it. With this, up went the shares till they reached 500 premium.

Tialpuxahua was done at 199 premium.

Anglo Mexican 10 pounds paid, went to 158 pounds premium.

United Mexican 10 ” ” , ” 155 pounds ”

Columbian 10 ” ” , ” 82 pounds ”

But the Real del Monte, a mine of longer standing, on which 70 pounds was paid up, went to 550 premium, and at a later period, for I am not following the actual sequence of events, reached the enormous height of 1350 premium.

The Prospectus of the Equitable Loan Company lamented in paragraph one the imposition practiced on the poor, and denounced the p.a.w.nbrokers'

15 per cent. In paragraph four it promised 40 per cent to its shareholders.

Philanthropy smiled in the heading, and Avarice stung in the tail. No wonder a royal duke and other good names figured in this concern.

Another eloquent sheet appealed to the national dignity. Should a nation that was just now being intersected by forty ca.n.a.l companies, and lighted by thirty gas companies, and every life in it worth a b.u.t.ton insured by a score of insurance companies, dwell in hovels?

Here was a country that, after long ruling the sea, was now mining the earth, and employing her spoils n.o.bly, lending money to every nation and tribe that would fight for const.i.tutional liberty. Should the princ.i.p.al city of so sovereign a nation be a collection of dingy dwellings made with burned clay? No; let these perishable and ign.o.ble, materials give way, and London be granite, or at least wear a granite front--with which up went the Red Granite Company.

A railway was projected from Dover to Calais, but the shares never came into the market.

The Rhine Navigation shares were snapped up directly. The original holders, having no faith in their own paper, sold large quant.i.ties directly for the account. But they had underrated the ardor of the public. At settling day the shares were at 28 premium, and the sellers found they had made a most original hedge; for ”the hedge” is not a daring operation that grasps at large gains; it is a timid and cautious maneuver, whose humble aim is to lower the figures of possible loss or gain. To be ruined by a stroke of caution so shocked the directors' sense of justice that they forged new coupons in imitation of the old, and tried to pa.s.s them off. The fraud was discovered; a committee sat on it. Respectables quaked. Finally, a scapegoat was put forward and expelled the Stock Exchange, and with that the inquiry was hushed. It would have let too much daylight in on a host of ”good names” in the City and on 'Change.

At the same time, the country threw itself with ardor into Transatlantic loans. This, however, was an existing speculation vastly dilated at the period we are treating, but created about five years earlier. Its antecedent history can be dispatched in a few words.

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