"
"Pheugh! Skinner!"
"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.
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