[1] Loftie’s “History of London”; and see S512.

A speculative craze followed, the like of which has never since been known.  Bubble companies sprang into existence with objects almost as absurd as those of the philosophers whom Swift ridiculed in “Gulliver’s Travel’s,” where one man was trying to make gunpowder out of ice, and another to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

A mere list of these companies would fill several pages.  One was to give instruction in astrology, by which every man might be able to foretell his own destiny by examining the stars; a second was to manufacture butter out of beech trees; a third was for a wheel for driving machinery, which once started would go on forever, thereby furnishing a cheap perpetual motion.

A fourth projector, going beyond all the rest in audacity, had the impudence to offer stock for sale in an enterprise “which shall be revealed hereafter.”  He found the public so gullible and so greedy that he sold 2000 pounds worth of the new stock in the course of a single morning.  He then prudently disappeard with the cash, and the unfortunate investors found that where he went with their money was not among the things to “be revealed hereafter.”

The narrow passage leading to the London stock exchange was crowded all day long with struggling fortune hunters, both men and women.  Suddenly, when the excitement was at its height, the bubble burst, as Law’s scheme in France had a little earlier.

Great numbers of people were hopelessly ruined, and the cry for vengeance was as loud as the bids for stock had once been.  One prominent government official who had helped to blow the bubble was sent to the Tower.  Another committed suicide rather than face a parliamentary committee of investigation, one of whose members had suggested that it would be an excellent plan to sew the South Sea directors up in sacks and throw them into the Thames.

537.  How a Terrible Disease was conquered, 1721, 1796.

But among the new things which the people were to try in that century was one which led to most beneficient results.  For many generations the great scourge of Europe was the smallpox.  Often the disease was as violent as the plague (S474), and carried off nearly as many victims.  Medical art, seemed powerless to deal with it, and even in years of ordinary health in England about one person out of ten died of this loathsome pestilence.  In the early part of George I’s reign, Lady Mary Montagu, then traveling to Turkey, wrote that the Turks were in the habit of inoculating their children for the disease, which rendered it much milder and less fatal, and that she was about to try the experiment on her own son.

Later, Lady Montagu returned to England, and through her influence and example the practice was introduced there, 1721.  It was tried first on five criminals in Newgate who had been sentenced to the gallows, but were promised their freedom if they would consent to the operation.  As it proved a complete success, the Princess of Wales, with the King’s consent, caused it to be tried on her daughter, with equally good results.