genuine, many doubtful, others as outrageous in their impositions on
human credulity as anything produced in our own times. The
company-promoter was abroad, in London, on 'Change, and at court. What
with royal favor, social prestige, general prosperity, the new national
eagerness to find vent for surplus commodities, and, above all, the
spirit of speculation fanned into flame by the real and fabled wonders
of America, what with all this the investing public could take its
choice of 'going the limit' in a hundred different and most alluring
ways. England was surprised at her own investing wealth. The East India
Company raised eight million dollars with ease from a thousand
shareholders and paid a first dividend of 87-1/2 per cent. Spices,
pearls, and silks came pouring into London; and English goods found vent
increasingly abroad.

Vastly expanding business opportunities of course produced the spirit of
the trust--and of very much the same sort of trust that Americans think
so ultra-modern now. Monopolies granted by the Crown and the volcanic
forces of widespread speculation prevented some of the abuses of the
trust. But there were Elizabethan trusts, for all that, though many a
promising scheme fell through. The Feltmakers' Hat Trust is a case in
point. They proposed buying up all the hats in the market so as to
oblige all dealers to depend upon one central warehouse. Of course they
issued a prospectus showing how everyone concerned would benefit by this
benevolent plan.

Ben Jonson and other playwrights were quick to seize the salient
absurdities of such an advertisement. In _The Staple of News_ Jonson
proposed a News Trust to collect all the news of the world, corner it,
classify it into authentic, apocryphal, barber's gossip, and so forth,
and then sell it, for the sole benefit of the consumer, in lengths to