Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/233

 give up the hope of profit and wealth by means of Louisiana; and the Regent and his advisers determined to hand it over to the famous Company of the West; better known as the Mississippi Company, through whose management it was confidently believed that immense wealth would flow into the empty treasury of France. This gigantic scheme, one of the most extensive and wonderful bubbles ever blown up to astonish, delude, and ruin thousands of people, was set in operation, and its charter registered by the parliament of Paris, on the 6th of September, 1717, the capital being a hundred millions of livres.

The fertile brain of John Law gave birth to this mighty project of making every body rich with nothing more substantial, in fact, than pieces of paper. Law was born in Edinburgh, in 1671; and so rapid had been his career, that, as Mr. Gayarré says, at twenty-three years of age, he was "a bankrupt, an adulterer, a murderer, and an exiled outlaw." But he was undoubtedly a man of financial ability, and by his agreeable and attractive manners, and his enthusiastic advocacy of his schemes, he succeeded in inflaming the imaginations of the mercurial Frenchmen, whose wishes—fathers to their thoughts—led them readily to adopt any plans for obtaining wealth in preference to those of steady industry and the natural gains of honest and honorable trade.

Arriving in Paris with two million and a half francs, which he had gained at the gambling table, he found himself there just at the right time. Louis XIV. died soon after, and, in 1716, the Duke of Orleans, the Regent, found the financial condition of France to be truly desperate. "The public debt was immense; it was a legacy bequeathed by the military glory of Louis XIV., and the other pompous vanities of his long reign. The consequence was, that the load of taxation was overwhelming, merely to pay the interest of this debt, without any hope of diminishing the capital. All the sources of industry were dried up: the very, winds which wafted the barks of commerce, seemed to have died away under the pressure of the time; trade stood still; the manufacturers were struck with palsy; the merchant, the trader, the artificer, once flourishing in affluence, were now transformed into clamorous beggars, and those who could yet command some small means, were preparing to emigrate to foreign parts. The life-blood that animated the kingdom, was stagnated in all its arteries, and the danger of an awful crisis became such, that it was actually proposed in the Council of State, to expunge the public debt, by an act of national bankruptcy. But the Regent has the credit of having rejected the proposition; and a commission was appointed to inquire into the financial situation of the kingdom, and to prepare a remedy for the evil."

Law now stepped forward, and the Regent eagerly caught at the proposed means of relief; a bank was established, as an experiment, bearing Law's name, with a capital of six millions of livres, divided into shares