“The amount actually paid at present (chiefly in bank-notes) is stated at 43,062,608 pounds, and the balance due at the end of the year on this set of ventures will be 204,937,392 pounds or thereabouts.  The projects of this year have not been collected, but they are on a similar scale.  Full a third of the general sum total is destined to foreign countries, either in loans or to work mines, etc., the return for which is uncertain and future.  All these must come to nothing, and ruin the shareholders that way, or else must sooner or later be paid in specie, since no foreign nation can use our paper, but must sell it to the Bank of England.  We stand, then, pledged to burst like a bladder, or to export in a few months thrice as much specie as we possess.  To sum up, if the country could be sold to-morrow, with every brick that stands upon it, the proceeds would not meet the engagements into which these joint-stock companies have inveigled her in the course of twenty months.  Viewed then, in gross, under the test, not of poetry and prospectus, but of arithmetic, the whole thing is a bubble.”

“A bubble?” uttered both the seniors in one breath, and almost in a scream.

“But I am ready to test it in detail.  Let us take three main features—­the share-market, the foreign loans, and the inflated circulation caused by the provincial banks.  Why do the public run after shares?  Is it in the exercise of a healthy judgment?  No; a cunning bait has been laid for human weakness.  Transferable shares valued at 100 pounds can be secured and paid for by small instalments of 5 pounds or less.  If, then, his 100 pound shares rise to 130 pounds each, the adventurer can sell at a nominal profit of 30 per cent, but a real profit of 600 per cent on his actual investment.  This intoxicates rich and poor alike.  It enables the small capitalist to operate on the scale that belongs, in healthy times, to the large capitalist; a beggar can now gamble like a prince; his farthings are accepted as counters for sovereigns; but this is a distinct feature of all the more gigantic bubbles recorded.  Here, too, you see, is illusory credit on a vast scale, with its sure consequence, inflated and fictitious values; another bit of soap that goes to every bubble in history.  Now for the Transatlantic loans.  I submit them to a simple test.  Judge nations like individuals.  If you knew nothing of a man but that he had set up a new shop, would you lend him money?  Then why lend money to new republics of whom you know nothing but that, born yesterday, they may die to-morrow, and that they are exhausted by recent wars, and that, where responsibility is divided, conscience is always subdivided?”

“Well said, Richard, well said.”

“If a stranger offered you thirty per cent, would you lend him your money?”

“No; for I should know he didn’t mean to pay.”

“Well, these foreign negotiators offer nominally five per cent, but, looking at the price of the stock, thirty, forty, and even fifty per cent.  Yet they are not so liberal as they appear; they could afford ninety per cent.  You understand me, gentlemen.  Would you lend to a man that came to you under an alias like a Newgate thief?  Cast your eye over this prospectus.  It is the Poyais loan.  There is no such place as Poyais.”