a mere tithe of the forecasting sagacity of Law, have provided for his retreat, and
secured a sufficient competency at least beyond the possibility of loss or hazard,
as thousands in fact did upon the strength of his measure. But Law, in deluding
others, laboured under still stronger delusion himself; like the fabled Frankenstein, he had created a monster whose power he had not at first calculated, and the measure of which he now found he could not prescribe, and he awaited the result with mingled feelings of hope, fear, and distrust. It was the ignorant interference of others with his own mysterious processes, which finally determined the fatal direction of those energies which he had called into being,
and which he might have been able, if not to restrain, at least to direct in another
and less ruinous manner. We are far from professing ourselves the unqualified
apologists of our enterprising countryman. It was criminal in him to make use of remedies of such a desperate kind as those to which he had recourse when his system began to stagger under its first revulsions; doubtless his temptations were
strong, but, invested as he was with authority, it was in his power to have re-
sisted them, and adopted a less empirical mode of treatment. In estimating his
moral character, it does not appear to us, that his renouncing protestantism, under
the circumstances in which he was placed, ought to weigh much against the uprightness of his intentions. Religion was with him a matter of inferior moment.
In his previous life he had manifested no symptoms of piety; an utter stranger
to the faith and power of the gospel, protestantism was superior to any other
ism with him, just in as far as it favoured his worldly policy. He believed
himself possessed of means to elevate a whole nation in the scale of wealth and
power, with all their attendant benign influences, and to give an impulse by
means of the fortunes of France to the destinies of the human species: and is it
to be supposed, that this consideration, thrown into the balance, should not
have caused that scale in which was placed a mere nominal profession of a religion—the truth of which he neither knew nor respected—to kick the beam?
Before resuming the thread of our biography, let us for a moment compare the financial catastrophe we have now been considering with that of the assignats of revolutionary France, and the celebrated crisis of the bank of England in 1797: we shall discover striking points of resemblance in the circumstances which led to these events, and draw from their comparison a few important truths. Credit is founded on the supposition of future value; it is this prospective value which is made to circulate as if it were existing value, in the form of a bank-note. Law founded his schemes upon the great basis of credit, which again he proposed to create by the profits arising from speculation in the shares of his India company. The financiers of revolutionary France wished to pay the national debt and the expenses of a universal war, with the national funds; but finding it impossible from the want of public confidence, or credit, to sell these funds, they anticipated their sale, and represented their supposed future value by paper-money called assignats. The bank of England, in return for its loans to the government, supposed the existence of two species of value, and accepted of these species in payment: the effects themselves, namely, of commerce, and the securities of the state-, the former a certain value, and the latter necessarily fluctuating with the political aspect of the times. In these three cases, we perceive three species of doubtful value; Law's share represented a future, but speculative and very uncertain value; the assignats represented certain funds which might ere long pass from under the hands of their present administrators; and the notes of the bank of England represented a value depending upon engagements, regarding the ability of the state to fulfil which there existed no absolute certainty. Now the crisis produced by the fluctuation
