All were for getting rich quickly. Life was costly--in some respects more costly comparatively than it is to-day. A fine gentleman would pay £126 for a suit of clothes, and that sum left out of account his silk stockings and his shoe buckles, his embroidered gloves and his clouded cane. Lord Mayor Sawbridge was stopped by highwaymen on Turnham Green, when he was returning home from Kew, and sent back to the Mansion House as naked as on the day when he was born--of so much value were the fine clothes he wore. Money was the great need and throughout the day such a roar arose from Exchange Alley as must have set the old Grasshopper trembling and quivering on the top of the Exchange. In 1720, George the First proposed that the South Sea Company should take over not merely the floating but the entire debt of England, which at that time amounted to £31,000,000. Even the staid Bank of England could stand it no longer. It came in with a proposal to take over the debt itself in the place of this upstart Company. But the upstart Company had several notable people behind it, amongst them the famous--or shall we say infamous?--Countess Von Platen; and the South Sea Company carried the day against the Bank of England. The shares jumped from 130 to 300. The King’s proposal was debated for two months in the House of Commons and for forty-eight hours in the House of Lords, and on April 7th of that year the Bill became law. Strangely enough, the South Sea Stock immediately fell. The Directors asked for a million more capital, offering £300 for £100. They got it, and they got more. Before Midsummer, the stock had risen to 800 per cent. The satirists, as you can imagine, got to work, but what did they matter? Satire, from the days of Aristophanes, has never stopped a rush. It will hold up this or that person, this or that group of people, to the ridicule of future generations, but it has no check upon them while they live. Neither Juvenal nor Molière deterred. The “Precieuses Ridicules” died not of satire but of their own inanition. The satirist and his fellows might rave as they liked against Change Alley and the South Seas but not one sedan chair dropped out of the crowd in consequence. It was not everybody, however, who was able to get near enough, or, if he did get near enough, to purchase the coveted stock. Other companies, therefore, with other projects no more unreasonable, sprang up in the same neighbourhood. The advertised capital of these companies ran, as a rule, into millions. And why not? The public was gullible. It was a matter of prestige--of the appeal rather than of actual cash. The nominal capital of the various undertakings floated during the years when the South Sea Company was at its zenith amounted to five times the entire currency of England and Europe. No one asked any questions--all were too anxious to buy.