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RV 78 (WORK IN LONDON) the world evolved the equally triumphant principles of Limited Liability, Specialism in Labour and the freedom of knowledge.

It was probably foreshadowed in the opening years of last century by the triumphant figure of Napoleon I. He more than anyone stands for that other triumphant principle: What man has done man can do. He raised the standard of the adventurer not only towards respectability but towards apotheosis.

Before his day the great London adventurers were, actively, the Drakes and the Raleighs; passively, Casanovas and Cagliostros. Roderick Random's idea of "making a career" after the Wars had failed him, was to pretend in London to be a man of fashion, to victimise an heiress, or in some miraculous way to pick up a "patron" with influence. There was not in those days any other career in the Town. Macshanes, O'Creegans, an occasional Colonel Evans, perhaps a French barber spying in the service of the Pretender, a few poets like Thomson of the "Seasons" and a few bastards like Tom Jones—all these people were obsessed by these two ideas. They sat in their best clothes toying with their 78