miliar to our present generation, which
needs only to turn Defoe's _Essay on Projects_ into contemporary
language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year
1939. That essay is filled with talk of "new Inventions, Engines, and I
know not what, which have rais'd the Fancies of Credulous People to such
height, that merely on the shadow of Expectation, they have form'd
Companies, chose Committees, appointed Officers, Shares, and Books,
rais'd great Stocks, and cri'd up an empty Notion to that degree that
People have been betray'd to part with their Money for Shares in a
New-Nothing."

Of the many speculative schemes of the early eighteenth century, none
is better known than the "South Sea Bubble." After a long period during
which English trade with the Spanish West Indies was carried on by
subterfuge, an Act of Parliament in 1710 incorporated into a joint-stock
company the state creditors, upon the basis of their loan of ten million
pounds to the Government and conferred upon them the monopoly of the
English trade with the Indies. In spite of these advantages, however,
the South Sea Company found itself so hampered and limited in credit
that it offered to convert the national debt into a "single redeemable
obligation" to the company in return for a monopoly of British foreign
trade outside England. The immediate and spectacular effect of that
offer is reflected in the many descriptions, both serious and satiric,
of an era of speculation which to many generations might seem
incredible--though not to this generation which has itself lived
through an orgy of speculation.

Clearly the South Sea Bubble, which reached its climax in 1720, was the
chief source of Captain Samuel Brunt's satire, which has an important
place in the minor literature called forth by the wild speculation
connected with the Bubble.[1] If the "Projects" proposed to Captain
Brunt[2] seem extreme to any modern reader, let him turn to the list of
"bubbles," still accessible in many places.[3] Nothing in Brunt is so
fantastic as many of the actual schemes suggested and acted upon in
the eighteenth century. The possibility of extracting gold from the
mountains of the moon is no more fanciful than several of the proposals
seriously received by Englishmen under the spell of speculation. As in
the kingdom of Cacklogallinia, so in London, men mortgaged their homes
and women sold their jewels [4] in order to purchase shares in wildcat
companies, b