The South Sea scheme was brought before the notice of the House of Commons in 1720. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Mr. Aislabie. We have already seen Mr. Aislabie as one of the secret committee who recommended the impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke. How well he was fitted for his office will appear from the fact that he was altogether taken in by the project, and by the financial arguments of those who brought it forward. Sunderland and Stanhope were taken in likewise--but there was nothing very surprising in that. A statesman of those days did not profess to understand anything about finance or economics, unless these subjects happened to belong to his department; and the statesman was exceptional who could honestly profess to understand them even when they did. Walpole, however, was a minister of a different order. He was the first of the line of statesmen-financiers. He saw through the bubble, and endeavored to make others see as clearly as he did himself. Walpole assailed the project in a pamphlet, and opposed it strenuously in his place in Parliament. He was {189} not at that time a minister of the Crown; perhaps, if he had been, the South Sea Bill might never have been presented to Parliament; but the nation and the Parliament were off their heads just then. The caricaturists and the authors of lampoon verses positively found out the South Sea scheme before the financiers and men of the city. On January 22, 1720, the House of Commons, sitting in what was then termed a Grand Committee, or what would now be called Committee of the whole House, took into consideration a proposal of the South Sea Company towards the redemption of the public debts. The proposal set forth that, "the Corporation of the Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South Sea and other parts of America, and for encouraging the fishery, having under their consideration how they may be most serviceable to his Majesty and his Government, and to show their zeal and readiness to concur in the great and honorable design of reducing the national debts," do "humbly apprehend that if the public debts and annuities mentioned in the annexed estimate were taken into and made part of the capital stock of the said Company, it would greatly contribute to that most desirable end." The Company then set forth the conditions under which they proposed to convert themselves into an agency for paying off the national debt, and making a profit for themselves.