The young man colored a moment, but never lost his ponderous calmness.
“I will give you figures in their turn, But we were to begin with the general view. Half-measures, then, are no measures; they imply a vacillating judgment; they are a vain attempt to make a pound of rashness and a pound of timidity into two pounds of prudence. You permit me that figure, sir; it comes from the summing-book. The able man of business fidgets. He keeps quiet, or carries something out.”
Old Skinner rubbed his hands. “These are wise words, sir.”
“No, only clever ones. This is book-learning. It is the sort of wisdom you and I have outgrown these forty years. Why, at his age I was choke-full of maxims. They are good things to read; but act proverbs, and into the Gazette you go. My faith in any general position has melted away with the snow of my seventy winters.”
“What, then, if it was established that all adders bite, would you refuse to believe his adder would bite you, sir?”
“Dick, if a single adder bit me, it would go farther to convince me that the next adder would bite me too than if fifty young Buffons told me all adders bite.”
The senile youth was disconcerted for a single moment. He hesitated. The keys that the old man had himself said would unlock his judgment lay beside him on the table. He could not help glancing slyly at them, but he would not use them before their turn. His mind was methodical. His will was strong in all things. He put his hand in his side-pocket, and drew out a quantity of papers neatly arranged, tied, and indorsed.
The old men instantly bestowed a more watchful sort of attention on him.
“This, gentlemen, is a list of the joint-stock companies created last year. What do you suppose is their number?”
“Two hundred and forty-three, gentlemen. Of these some were stillborn, but the majority hold the market. The capital proposed to be subscribed on the sum total is two hundred and forty-eight millions.”
“The amount actually paid at present (chiefly in bank-notes) is stated at 43,062,608 pounds, and the balance due at the end of the year on this set of ventures will be 204,937,392 pounds or thereabouts. The projects of _this year_ have not been collected, but they are on a similar scale. Full a third of the general sum total is destined to foreign countries, either in loans or to work mines, etc., the return for which is uncertain and future. All these must come to nothing, and ruin the shareholders that way, or else must sooner or later be paid in specie, since no foreign nation can use our paper, but must sell it to the Bank of England. We stand, then, pledged to burst like a bladder, or to _export_ in a few months thrice as much specie as we possess. To sum up, if the country could be sold to-morrow, with every brick that stands upon it, the proceeds would not meet the engagements into which these joint-stock companies have inveigled her in the course of twenty months. Viewed then, in gross, under the test, not of poetry and prospectus, but of arithmetic, the whole thing is a bubble.”