Only at night, on Saturday afternoons, and during the still peace of a City Sabbath, do the noise of men and the stir of business cease in the South Sea House. Yet, nevertheless, when one thinks of all that has happened there, of the dreams and hopes and miseries of which it was the begetter, it remains one of the most melancholy temples to folly that man has yet erected. The South Sea Company had been established in 1710 by Harley himself, and was going along quietly and soberly enough for the time; but the example of the Mississippi Company was too strong for it. The South Sea Company, too, made to itself waxen wings, and prepared to fly above the clouds. The directors offered to relieve the State of its debt on condition of obtaining a monopoly of the South Sea trade. The nation was to take shares in the company in the first instance, and to deal with the company, for its commercial and other wares, in the second; and by means of the exclusive dealing in shares and in products it was to pay off the National Debt. In other words, three men, all having nothing, and heavily in debt, were to go into exclusive dealings with each other, and were thus to make fortunes, discharge their liabilities, and live in luxury for the rest of their days. Stated thus, the proposition looks marvellously absurd. But it is not, in its essential conditions, more absurd than many a financial project which floats successfully for a time. Money-making, the hardest and most practical of all occupations, the task which can soonest be tested by results, is the business of all others in which men are most easily led astray, most greedy to be led astray. Sydney Smith speaks of a certain French lady whose whole nature cried out for her seduction. There are seasons when the whole nature of man seems to cry out for his financial seduction. The South Sea project expanded and inflated as the {188} Mississippi Scheme had done. Its temporary success turned the heads of the whole population. [Sidenote: 1720--The bank competes] Hundreds of schemes, still more wild, sprang into sudden existence. Some of the projects then put forward, and believed in, surpass in senseless extravagance anything satirized by Ben Jonson. So wild was the passion for new enterprises, that it seemed as if, at one time, anybody had only to announce any scheme, however preposterous, in order to find people competing for shares in it. The only condition of things in our own time that could be compared with this epoch of insane speculation is the railway mania of 1846, when, for a brief season, George Hudson was king, and set up his hat in the market-place, and all England bowed down in homage to it. But the epidemic of speculation in the reign of the railway king was comparatively harmless and reasonable when compared with the midsummer madness of the South Sea scheme.