Richard Hardie resumed.  “We were never so overrun with rotten banks as now.  Shoemakers, cheesemongers, grocers, write up ‘Bank’ over one of their windows, and deal their rotten paper by the foolscap ream.  The issue of their larger notes is colossal, and renders a panic inevitable soon or late; but, to make it doubly sure, they have been allowed to utter 1 pound and 2 pound notes.  They have done it, and on a frightful scale.  Then, to make it trebly sure, the just balance between paper and specie is disturbed in the other scale as well as by foreign loans to be paid in gold.  In 1793 the candle was left unsnufled, but we have lighted it at both ends and put it down to roast.  Before the year ends, every sovereign in the banks of this country may be called on to cash 30 pounds of paper—­bank-paper, share-paper, foolscap-paper, waste-paper.  In 1793, a small excess of paper over specie had the power to cause a panic and break some ninety banks; but our excess of paper is far larger, and with that fatal error we have combined foreign loans and three hundred bubble companies.  Here, then, meet three bubbles, each of which, unaided, secures a panic.  Events revolve, gentlemen, and reappear at intervals.  The great French bubble of 1719 is here to-day with the addition of two English tom-fooleries, foreign loans and 1 pound notes.  Mr. Law was a great financier.  Mr. Law was the first banker and the greatest.  All mortal bankers are his pupils, though they don’t know it.  Mr. Law was not a fool; his critics are.  Mr. Law did not commit one error out of six that are attributed to him by those who judge him without reading, far less studying, his written works.  He was too sound and sober a banker to admit small notes.  They were excluded from his system.  He found France on the eve of bankruptcy; in fact, the state had committed acts of virtual bankruptcy.  He saved her with his bank.

“Then came his two errors, one remedial, the other fatal.  No. 1, he created a paper company and blew it up to a bubble.  When the shares had reached the skies, they began to come down, like stones, by an inevitable law.  No. 2, to save them from their coming fate, he propped them with his bank.  Overrating the power of governments, and underrating Nature’s, he married the Mississippi shares (at forty times their value) to his banknotes by edict.  What was the consequence?  The bank paper, sound in itself, became rotten by marriage.  Nothing could save the share-paper.  The bank paper, making common cause with it, shared its fate.  Had John Law let his two tubs each stand on its own bottom, the shares would have gone back to what they came from—­nothing; the bank, based as it was on specie, backed stoutly by the government, and respected by the people for great national services, would have weathered the storm and lasted to this day.  But he tied his rickety child to his healthy child, and flung them into a stormy sea, and told them to swim together:  they sank together.  Now observe,