putation was made
of the whole capital stock of the South-Sea company at the end of the year
1720. It was found to amount to thirty-seven millions eight hundred
thousand pounds, of which the stock allotted to all the proprietors only
amounted to twenty-four millions five hundred thousand pounds. The
remainder of thirteen millions three hundred thousand pounds belonged to
the company in their corporate capacity, and was the profit they had made
by the national delusion. Upwards of eight millions of this were taken
from the company, and divided among the proprietors and subscribers
generally, making a dividend of about 33l. 6s. 8d. per cent. This was a
great relief. It was further ordered, that such persons as had borrowed
money from the South-Sea company upon stock actually transferred and
pledged at the time of borrowing to or for the use of the company, should
be free from all demands, upon payment of ten per cent of the sums so
borrowed. They had lent about eleven millions in this manner, at a time
when prices were unnaturally raised; and they now received back one
million one hundred thousand, when prices had sunk to their ordinary
level.

But it was a long time before public credit was thoroughly restored.
Enterprise, like Icarus, had soared too high, and melted the wax of her
wings; like Icarus, she had fallen into a sea, and learned, while
floundering in its waves, that her proper element was the solid ground.
She has never since attempted so high a flight.

In times of great commercial prosperity there has been a tendency to
over-speculation on several occasions since then. The success of one
project generally produces others of a similar kind. Popular imitativeness
will always, in a trading nation, seize hold of such successes, and drag a
community too anxious for profits into an abyss from which extrication is
difficult. Bubble companies, of a kind similar to those engendered by the
South-Sea project, lived their little day in the famous year of the panic,
1825. On that occasion, as in 1720, knavery gathered a rich harvest from
cupidity, but both suffered when the day of reckoning came. The schemes of
the year 1836 threatened, at one time, results as disastrous; but they
were happily averted before it was too late.[27]

[27] The South-Sea project remained until 1845 the greatest
example in British history of the infatuation of the people
for commercial gambling. The first edition of thes