the poet; since Lord Bolingbroke has been heard to declare, that he
had never conversed with a man, who more clearly understood the
commerce and finances of England. In the year 1716 he was elected
one of the Directors of the South Sea Company; and his books
exhibited the proof that, before his acceptance of this fatal
office, he had acquired an independent fortune of sixty thousand
pounds.

But his fortune was overwhelmed in the shipwreck of the year twenty,
and the labours of thirty years were blasted in a single day. Of
the use or abuse of the South Sea scheme, of the guilt or innocence
of my grandfather and his brother Directors, I am neither a
competent nor a disinterested judge. Yet the equity of modern times
must condemn the violent and arbitrary proceedings, which would have
disgraced the cause of justice, and would render injustice still
more odious. No sooner had the nation awakened from its golden
dream, than a popular and even a parliamentary clamour demanded
their victims: but it was acknowledged on all sides that the South
Sea Directors, however guilty, could not be touched by any known
laws of the land. The speech of Lord Molesworth, the author of the
State of Denmark, may shew the temper, or rather the intemperance,
of the House of Commons. "Extraordinary crimes (exclaimed that
ardent Whig) call aloud for extraordinary remedies. The Roman
lawgivers had not foreseen the possible existence of a parricide;
but as soon as the first monster appeared, he was sewn in a sack,
and cast headlong into the river; and I shall be content to inflict
the same treatment on the authors of our present ruin." His motion
was not literally adopted; but a bill of pains and penalties was
introduced, a retroactive statute, to punish the offences, which did
not exist at the time they were committed. Such a pernicious