Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/193

Rh exports may very possibly have been compensated ten times over to our manufacturers and producers by the readier vent and higher prices they obtained for their goods without crossing the seas. The single circumstance of the decline that now took place in the rate of interest may be regarded as a proof of the growing abundance of capital, seeing that it cannot apparently be attributed to the only other cause by which such an effect could be produced, a diminution of the field for the employment of capital; for the rate of interest always represents the effective value of capital, which again (as with all other things that are marketable or exchangeable) varies directly as the demand and inversely as the supply. Now, at this time the national interest of money had fallen to three per cent.: even the government, which, from the extent of its necessities always made its loans at a disadvantage, seldom throughout the reign of George I. borrowed at more than four. And other indications pointed in the same direction, disclosing in like manner an economical condition of the nation, and a temper of the public mind, from which the chief danger to be apprehended was the wanton and impatient recklessness of unwonted plenty and prosperity;—among the rest the taste for lotteries, projects, and other short cuts to wealth, which appears to have been ever since the Revolution more and more gaining possession of the popular mind. For it is a mistake to suppose that the history of projects and babble companies in England begins with the year of the South Sea delusion. They had never, indeed, come in so great an inundation before, but we had had less considerable outbreaks of the same kind of spirit on other occasions since the Revolution. The years 1694 and 1695, for instance, were remarkable project-years. Among many more schemes that were then set on foot, and which eventually came to nothing, were the famous Dr. Hugh Chamberlain, the man-midwife's, Land Bank, for lending money at a low interest on the security of land, and establishing a national paper currency on that basis; another scheme of the same kind proposed by one John Briscoe; various projects of fishing for lost treasure