Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/310

370 protect his hotel from the insult of the exasperated populace. The infamous Dubois, who had enriched himself by his speculations during the height of the Mississippi madness, now united with Law to expel Argenson from the cabinet; and the regent, whose character though intrepid was not without its weak points, was persuaded at their instigation, to take the seals from his faithful minister, and bestow them upon Agnesseau, who tamely resumed the high office, from which he had been expelled by the very men to whose influence he now beheld himself indebted for his second elevation.

Nothing could now save the system of the great financier; his billets and actions were fur ever stripped of their value in the eye of the public; and the most expedient measure that could now be adopted with regard to them, was to withdraw them as promptly as possible from circulation. To demolish in the most prudent manner the vast structure reared by his own labour was now the highest praise to which Law could aspire. By a series of arbitrary financial operations, which it would be tedious here to relate, the public creditors were reduced to the utmost distress, the national debt annihilated, and the whole affairs of the kingdom thrown into the utmost perplexity. "Thus ended," to use the words of Voltaire, "that astonishing game of chance played by an unknown foreigner against a whole nation." Its original success stimulated various individuals to attempt imitations of it, among which the most famous was the South Sea bubble of England, which entailed disgrace and ruin on many thousands of families. It would be doing injustice to Law's character were we to view him as the sole author of these misfortunes: his views were liberal beyond the spirit of the times in which he lived; he had unquestionably the real commercial interests of his adopted foster-country at heart; he did not proceed on speculation alone; on the contrary, his principles were to a certain degree the very same as those the adoption of which has raised Britain to her present commercial greatness, and given an impulse to trade throughout the world, such as was never witnessed in the transactions of ancient nations. His error lay in over-estimating the strength and breadth of the foundation on which his gigantic superstructure rested. Unquestionably in his cooler moments he never contemplated carrying the principle of public credit to the enormous and fatal length to which he was afterwards driven by circumstances; it was the unbounded confidence of the public mind, prompted by the desire of gain and the miraculous effects of the system in its earliest development, the enthusiasm of that mind, transported beyond all bounds of moderation and forbearance, by a first success eclipsing its most sanguine expectations, realizing to thousands of individuals the possession of wealth to an amount beyond all that they had ever conceived in imagination, the contagious example of the first fortunate specu- lators intoxicated with success, and fired to the most extravagant and presump- tuous anticipations, by which men can be lured into acts of blinded infatuation or thoughtless folly, it was these circumstances we say, over which Law had necessarily little control, that converted his projects into the bane of those for whom they were at first calculated to serve as a wholesome antidote.

Law was in fact more intent on following out his idea than aggrandizing his fortunes. Riches, influence, honours, were showered upon him in the necessity of things; the man who had given birth to the wealth of a whole kingdom, whose schemes had for a while invested all who entered into them with imaginary treasures, by whose single mind the workings of that complicated engine which had already produced such dazzling results as seemed to justify the most extravagant anticipations of the future, were comprehended and directed, must have risen during the existence of that national delusion, to the highest pinnacle of personal wealth and influence, and might, though only endowed with