The Long Shadow of Economic Ruin

We now enter upon a chapter of modern English history which the moralist regards, and will for a century to come regard, with wonder and shame. It shows how childish the mind of a nation can be; as crises of another kind show how brave and noble it can be, according to the appeal made to its lower or its higher faculties. The same people who had been calm and courageous when their national existence appeared to be in peril, magnanimous and disinterested when the partition of European territory was going on abroad after the peace, staunch and loyal in the cause of a persecuted queen, and well principled in liberty when a new course of foreign policy was entered upon, were now to prove themselves very children under the temptation of sudden prosperity, amidst extraordinary facilities for gambling. It was not altogether rapacity which instigated the follies of 1824 and 1825. Too many were eager for gain, making haste to be rich; and of these the sharpers of society made an easy prey; but with many more, the charm was in the excitement—in the pleasure of sympathy in large enterprises—in the rousing of the faculties of imagination and conception, when their field of commerce extended over the Pampas and the Andes, and beyond the furthest seas, and among the ice-rocks of the poles. When the grey-haired merchant grew eloquent by his fireside about the clefts of the Cordillera, where the precious metals glitter to the miner’s torch, it was not his expected gains alone that fired his eye and quickened his utterance, but that gratification of his conceptive faculty to which his ordinary life had ministered but too little. When the professional man periled his savings to cut through the Isthmus of Panama, he gloried in helping on a mighty work; and described, like a poet, the pouring of the one vast ocean into the other, and the procession of the merchant-ships of the world riding through on the new-made current. And so with the aged ladies and retired servants, who gave from their pittance of property and income whatever they could squeeze out, to hold shares in steam-ovens, steam-laundries, or milk-and-egg companies. They had their visions of domestic comfort and luxury; and looked joyfully for the time when good things of the table and the wardrobe should abound with little expense of toil. Now was the time for those who make their market of the unwary to come forth and be busy. Needy speculators and scheming attorneys, and gamblers of every class, used their opportunity, first for exciting the gambling spirit everywhere within their reach, and then for introducing themselves into a society where at other times they could have obtained no admittance. They knew that their opportunity was short; and they used it diligently. Seasons of speculation and reaction may be observed in the history of every nation, and may be expected to recur till nations have grown much wiser than they are; but such a spectacle of intoxication and collapse as is offered by the years 1824–1826 will hardly, we may hope, be equaled again in England.

Among the records of the time we have the following picture of the state of society in its material aspect, amidst which the fever of speculation arose:

“The increased wealth of the middle classes is so obvious, that we can neither walk the fields, visit the shops, nor examine the workshops and storehouses, without being deeply impressed with the changes which a few years have produced. We see the fields better cultivated, the barns and stackyards more fully stored, the horses, cows, and sheep, more abundant and in better condition, and all the implements of husbandry improved in their order, their construction, and their value. In the cities, towns, and villages, we find shops more numerous and better in their appearance, and the several goods more separated from each other; a division that is the infallible token of increased sales. We see the accumulation of wares of every kind adapted to the...