obligation" to the company in return for a monopoly of British foreign
trade outside England. The immediate and spectacular effect of that
offer is reflected in the many descriptions, both serious and satiric,
of an era of speculation which to many generations might seem
incredible--though not to this generation which has itself lived
through an orgy of speculation.

Clearly the South Sea Bubble, which reached its climax in 1720, was the
chief source of Captain Samuel Brunt's satire, which has an important
place in the minor literature called forth by the wild speculation
connected with the Bubble.[1] If the "Projects" proposed to Captain
Brunt[2] seem extreme to any modern reader, let him turn to the list of
"bubbles," still accessible in many places.[3] Nothing in Brunt is so
fantastic as many of the actual schemes suggested and acted upon in
the eighteenth century. The possibility of extracting gold from the
mountains of the moon is no more fanciful than several of the proposals
seriously received by Englishmen under the spell of speculation. As in
the kingdom of Cacklogallinia, so in London, men mortgaged their homes
and women sold their jewels [4] in order to purchase shares in wildcat
companies, born one day, only to die the next. As the anonymous author
of one of many South Sea Ballads wrote in his "Merry Remarks upon
Exchange Alley Bubbles":

Our greatest ladies hither come,
And ply in chariots daily;
Oft pawn their jewels for a sum
To venture in the Alley.

The meteoric rise in the price of shares in the moon-mountain project
of the Cacklogallinians is no greater than the actual rise in prices of