reigns, having first advertised it in the newspapers the preceding day, and he might in a few hours find subscribers for one or two millions—in some cases more—of imaginary stock. Yet many of those very subscribers were far from believing those projects feasible: it was enough for their purpose that there would very soon be a premium on the receipts for those subscriptions, when they generally got rid of them in the crowded alley to others more credulous than themselves. And, in all events, the projector was sure of the deposit money. The first purchasers of those receipts soon found second purchasers, and so on, at still higher prices, coming from all parts of the town, and even many from the adjacent counties; and so great was the wild confusion in the crowd in Exchange Alley, that the same project or bubble has been known to be sold, at the same instant of time, ten per cent, higher at one end of the alley than at the other end." In some cases what people got for their money scarcely professed to be anything else than simply a receipt for it—which, nevertheless, the purchaser was to try to pass off' at a higher price upon somebody else; as if it were to be attempted to circulate a description of bank-notes without either signature or promise of payment, on the mere chance of each successive receiver finding some other more sanguine or venturous than himself to take the worthless paper off his hands on a similar calculation. This might be called a paper currency resting not on credit but on hope. Anderson says that he well remembers what were called Globe Permits, which came to be currently sold for sixty guineas and upwards each in the alley, and which were, nevertheless, only square bits of a playing card bearing the impression in wax of the sign of the Globe Tavern in the neighbourhood, and the words Sail Cloth Permits for a motto, without any signature, and only conveying to their possessors the permission to subscribe some time afterwards to a new Sail Cloth Company not yet formed! We cannot help thinking that money must have been pretty plentiful when people could be found to give sixty guineas for any such article. Yet it
