But these were not the only papers issued. The Bank of England had been established in 1694; and eighteen years later, paper credits were issued by South Carolina to the amount of £48,000. Massachusetts with her presses could of course print more promises, and in 1714 she beat South Carolina by £2,000. Other Colonies followed, even Rhode Island, distrusting Providence, built a paper-house on the sands of credit. The floods soon came upon all these unstable edifices, and there were many “moving accidents by flood” to the washed banks. The slight silver foundations were undermined, and the banking-houses fell, and “great was the fall thereof.” Twenty-five years after the first bank was established, few of the credits were worth over twenty cents on the promised dollar. Those of North Carolina descended to seven,—almost as low as Confederate paper in 1865. But the scheme most American in size and promises was started in France by a Scotchman in 1716. He proposed to the French Regent and established upon the boundless trust in the untold, because not unfolded, mining wealth of the valley of the Mississippi, a company, spawning 200,000 shares of stock, aggregating at the par value one thousand millions of livres, which, on the iron strength of human faith, six millions only of silver in its own vaults, and the handsome certificates that hinted at more figures than ordinary arithmetic can compute, agreed to pay the vast public debt of France, swollen under Louis XIV. higher than a Mississippi freshet, and to distribute forty per cent annually to the stockholders. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico._ It seemed as if the steel armor of De Soto, buried in the oozy bottom of the Mississippi River, touched by John Law’s paper wand, had dissolved, and by a wonderful alchemy had been turned into liquid gold, whose exuberant floods were to make of France an auriferous Delta. The prophets of a rise were many, the real profits very few; and in four years the principal had gone where De Soto’s armor was rusting. The golden Armada of France was snagged, and dispersed beyond the reach of diver or bell. The speed with which shares, swollen from one thousand to ten thousand, were suddenly pricked and vanished, and the rapid changes in the fortunes of their holders, are well expressed by a French pasquinade of the period:— “Lundi, j’achetais des actions; Mardi, je gagnai des millions; Mercredi, j’ornai mon menage; Jeudi, je pris un equipage; Vendredi, je m’en fis au bal; Et Samedi, a l’hopital.”[A] ----- Footnote A: Which may be turned out of its native bed into an inferior English one thus:—