There is, it is true, a great difference between new inventions and
projects, between improvement of manufactures or lands (which tend
to the immediate benefit of the public, and employing of the poor),
and projects framed by subtle heads with a sort of a deceptio visus
and legerdemain, to bring people to run needless and unusual
hazards: I grant it, and give a due preference to the first. And
yet success has so sanctified some of those other sorts of projects
that it would be a kind of blasphemy against fortune to disallow
them. Witness Sir William Phips's voyage to the wreck; it was a
mere project; a lottery of a hundred thousand to one odds; a hazard
which, if it had failed, everybody would have been ashamed to have
owned themselves concerned in; a voyage that would have been as much
ridiculed as Don Quixote's adventure upon the windmill. Bless us!
that folks should go three thousand miles to angle in the open sea
for pieces of eight! Why, they would have made ballads of it, and
the merchants would have said of every unlikely adventure, "It, was
like Phips's wreck-voyage." But it had success, and who reflects
upon the project?


"Nothing's so partial as the laws of fate,
Erecting blockheads to suppress the great.
Sir Francis Drake the Spanish plate-fleet won;
He had been a pirate if he had got none.
Sir Walter Raleigh strove, but missed the plate,
And therefore died a traitor to the State.
Endeavour bears a value more or less,
Just as 'tis recommended by success:
The lucky coxcomb ev'ry man will prize,
And prosp'rous actions always pass for wise."