Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions
by
Charles MacKay
Trading Stories of some of the crazy things
that have happened in the world of trading, and how it effected
the currencies and markets.
NATIONAL DELUSIONS.
N'en deplaise a ces fous nommes sages de Grece;
En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgre tous leurs soins,
Ne different entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
BOILEAU.
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals,
they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons
of
excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they
do. We find
that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one
object, and
go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their
attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
We see one
nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members,
with a
fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming
crazed
upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering
its senses
until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of
groans and
tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in
the annals of
Europe its population lost their wits about the Sepulchre
of Jesus,
and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land: another
age went
mad for fear of the Devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands
of
victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time,
the many
became crazed on the subject of the Philosopher's Stone,
and committed
follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once
thought a
venial offence in very many countries of Europe to destroy
an enemy by
slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea
of stabbing a
man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies
of
gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder,
until
poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable.
Some
delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted
for ages,
flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations
as among
the early barbarians with whom they originated, -- that
of duelling, for
instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the
future, which
seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely
from the
popular mind. Money, again,
has often been a cause of the delusion of
multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate
gamblers,
and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece
of paper or pounds sterling. To trace the history
of the most prominent of these delusions is the
object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said,
think in
herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while
they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
In the present state of civilization, society
has often shown
itself very prone to run a career of folly from the last-mentioned
cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in
a most
extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness,
set the
first great example, and was very soon imitated by England
with her
South Sea Bubble. At an earlier period, Holland made
herself still
more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, by the frenzy
which came
over her people for the love of Tulips. Melancholy
as all these
delusions were in their ultimate results, their history
is most
amusing. A more ludicrous and yet painful spectacle, than
that which
Holland presented in the years 1635 and 1636, or France
in 1719 and
1720, can hardly be imagined. Taking them in the order of
their
importance, we shall commence our history with John Law
and the famous
Mississippi stock trading scheme of the years above
mentioned.
