Page:Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Vol 1.djvu/70

54 and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.

Well might Swift exclaim, comparing Change Alley to a gulf in the South Sea: Subscribers here by thousands float,
 * And jostle one another down,

Each paddling in his leaky boat,
 * And here they fish for gold and drown.

Now buried in the depths below,
 * Now mounted up to heaven again,

They reel and stagger to and fro,
 * At their wit's end, like drunken men.

Meantime, secure on Garraway cliffs,
 * A savage race, by shipwrecks fed,

Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs,
 * And strip the bodies of the dead."

Another fraud that was very successful was that of the "Globe Permits," as they were called. They were nothing more than square pieces of playing-cards, on which was the impression of a seal, in wax, bearing the sign of the Globe Tavern, in the neighbourhood of Exchange Alley, with the inscription of "Sail-Cloth Permits." The possessors enjoyed no other advantage from them than permission to subscribe at some future time to a new sail-cloth manufactory, projected by one who was then known to be a man of fortune, but who was afterwards involved in the peculation and punishment of the South-Sea directors. These permits sold for as much as sixty guineas in the Alley.

Persons of distinction, of both sexes, were deeply engaged in all these bubbles; those of the male sex going to taverns and coffee-houses to meet their brokers, and the ladies resorting for the same purpose to the shops of milliners and haberdashers. But it did not follow that all these people believed in the feasibility of the schemes to which they subscribed; it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really credulous. So great was the confusion of the crowd in the alley, that shares in the same bubble were known to have been sold at the same instant ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other. Sensible men beheld the extraordinary infatuation of the people with sorrow and alarm. There were some both in and out of parliament who