llustration: CARICATURE.[22]]

[22] Caricature, copied from _Bubblers' Medley_, published by
Carrington Bowles.

During the progress of this famous bubble, England presented a singular
spectacle. The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation. Men
were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure profits of cautious
industry. The hope of boundless wealth for the morrow made them heedless
and extravagant for to-day. A luxury, till then unheard-of, was
introduced, bringing in its train a corresponding laxity of morals. The
over-bearing insolence of ignorant men, who had arisen to sudden wealth by
successful gambling, made men of true gentility of mind and manners blush
that gold should have power to raise the unworthy in the scale of society.
The haughtiness of some of these "cyphering cits," as they were termed by
Sir Richard Steele, was remembered against them in the day of their
adversity. In the parliamentary inquiry, many of the directors suffered
more for their insolence than for their peculation. One of them, who, in
the full-blown pride of an ignorant rich man, had said that he would feed
his horse upon gold, was reduced almost to bread and water for himself;
every haughty look, every overbearing speech, was set down, and repaid
them a hundredfold in poverty and humiliation.

The state of matters all over the country was so alarming, that George I.
shortened his intended stay in Hanover, and returned in all haste to
England. He arrived on the 11th of November, and parliament was summoned
to meet on the 8th of December. In the mean time, public meetings were
held in every considerable town of the empire, at which petitions were
adopted, praying the vengeance of the legislature upon the South-Sea
directors, who, by their fraudulent practices, had brought the nation to
the brink of ruin. Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as
culpable as the South-Sea company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice
of the people,--the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every
nobler quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had
made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the
net held out for them by scheming projectors. These things were never
mentioned. The people were a simple, honest, hard-working people, ruined
by a gang of robbers, who were to be hanged, drawn, and quartered without
mercy.

This was the almost unanimous feeling of the