Page:The Tulip Mania.djvu/1

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ANKIND is undoubtedly the most reasoning of all the animal race: yet how often does it happen that whole peoples appear to have lost their reasoning faculties! There is something wonderful in the extent to which popular delusions are sometimes carried. Breaking out suddenly, they run through nations like an epidemic; nay, occasionally all civilized nations are infected by them. The frenzy of the Crusades was not confined to one country nor to a single age. Beginning in the tenth century, it was as late as the fifteenth that Columbus assigned as a reason for attempting the discovery of America that thereby money could be obtained for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. At one time all France is carried away by the tremendous extravagance of the Mississippi scheme, which raised real estate to such a price that it was valued at one hundred years' purchase, that is, its rent only paid one per cent. on its cost. A little later and England burst out wither her South Sea Bubble, creating such a hunger for special corporations that one man who advertised an unknown scheme to be revealed at the end of the month, ten dollars to be paid down for each share subscribed for, took in $10,000 the first day. The sturdy burghers of Holland took the tulip mania so badly that single bulbs that could not flower till another year would sell for more than $2000 apiece. Nor has our own country been free from these financial epidemics. Many of our readers can remember the Morus multicaulis speculation of forty years ago, and the Eastern land investments a little later. Within ten years Bavaria has been seduced into pouring all its movable wealth into the lap of a woman who had no security to offer, simply because she paid high rates of interest, and covered her banking operations with the flowered robe of priestly confidence. No people is so wise that it is not occasionally carried away by popular frenzy, none so prudent that it will not occasionally make large investments in hope that to-morrow's rise will greatly overpay to-day's risks. And nothing is better calculated to show to the world the dangers of schemes that promise too much than to give their true history; for these schemes always offer to benefit communities without making any addition to their productive