The not unnatural result was that the unfortunate Irish turned to all sorts of secret devices for shipping their wool, contrary to the provisions of this extraordinarily cruel law, to France; and this secret traffic is generally regarded as the starting-point of all the many secret societies, the Whiteboys, the Fenians, and so on, which have figured largely in Ireland's later political story. So much of the bitter feud between England and Ireland has been due to the folly and injustice of the former nation! For all our just pride in the greatness of our country, we must try to keep a clear vision and not let that proper pride blind us to England's faults. One of the reasons why I suggested that a French force landing in England in "the Forty-five" might have changed the subsequent story of the Anglo-Saxon people, is that it might have had the result of modifying those very stupid measures by which England drove her American colonies to revolt, and so caused the separation from the mother land of the United States. It is always interesting to speculate about what might have happened to the world story had this or the other event gone just a little differently. It is interesting; but we can never know the answers to such questioning. The story of that lamentable separation belongs to the second half of the century with which we are now dealing. For the moment preparation is in making for it by the continual increase of the English colonists and their continual expansion over more and more of the virgin land. But still the French are in possession of all that vast extent then included under the name of Louisiana. In a former chapter we saw how unmeasured were the hopes of Spain regarding that fabled city of El Dorado, which seems to have been imagined as built and paved with gold. In the new world which the voyagers of the previous century had begun to open {123} out for men of Europe, no vision seemed impossible to realise, and the French, in their American possessions, appear to have deemed that they had found something equivalent to a city of gold--a land with boundless possibilities of wealth. Nor were the less imaginative English immune from the like delusive dreams. We had our "South Sea Bubble"; the French their "Mississippi Bubble." Bubble was the name applied to those schemes only when they had proved themselves, by bursting, to be filled with nothing more substantial or golden than the air. The English bubble, at its inception, was a grave business proposition styled the South Sea Company. The French equivalent was the Mississippi Company, or Compagnie de l'Occident. Like the East India Company, these were formed by persons who subscribed funds for exploiting the wealth, real or imaginary, of the countries indicated by the titles of each. Shares in both one and the other rose to ridiculous values; and the bursting of the one, as of the other, brought ruin to very many in both countries. [Sidenote: The French bourgeois]