until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and
tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of
Europe its population lost their wits about the Sepulchre of Jesus,
and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land: another age went
mad for fear of the Devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of
victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many
became crazed on the subject of the Philosopher's Stone, and committed
follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a
venial offence in very many countries of Europe to destroy an enemy by
slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a
man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of
gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until
poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some
delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages,
flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations as among
the early barbarians with whom they originated, -- that of duelling, for
instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which
seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely from the
popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of
multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers,
and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.
To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the
object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in
herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

In the present state of civilization, society has often shown
itself very prone to run a career of folly from the last-mentioned
cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in a most
extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness, set the