ting
from frequent elections, in which party feeling ran to dangerous
extremes.

[2] The Triennial Act (SS439, 517) provided that at the end of three
years Parliament must be dissolved and a new election held. This was
to prevent the sovereign from keeping that body in power indefinitely,
contrary, perhaps, to the political feeling of the country, which
might prefer a different set of representatives. Under the Septennial
Act the time was extended four years, making seven in all, but the
sovereign may, of course, dissolve Parliament at any time. In 1911
the Parliament Act (S631) limited the duration of Parliament to five
years.

536. The South Sea Bubble, 1720.

A few years later a gigantic enterprise was undertaken by the South
Sea Company, a body of merchants originally organized as a company
trading in the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A Scotchman
named Law had started a similar project in France, known as the
"Mississippi Company," which proposed to pay off the national debt of
France from the profits of its commerce with the West Indies and the
country bordering on the Mississippi River.

Following his example, the South Sea Company now undertook to pay off
the English National Debt (S503), mainly, it is said, from the profits
of the slave trade between Africa and Brazil.[1] Sir Robert Walpole
(S534) had no faith in the scheme, and attacked it vigorously; but
other influential members of the Government gave it their
encouragement. The directors came out with prospectuses promising
dividends of fifty per cent on all money invested. Everybody rushed
to buy stock, and the shares rapidly advaced from 100 pounds to 1000
pounds a share.

[1] Loftie's "History of London"; and see S512.

A speculative craze followed, the like of which has never since been
known. Bubble companies sprang into existence with objects almost as
absurd as those of the philosophers whom Swift ridiculed in
"Gulliver's Travel's," where one man was trying to make gunpowder out
of ice, and another to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

A mere list of these companies would fill several pages. One was to
give instruction in astrology, by which every man might be able to
foretell his own destiny by examining the stars; a second was to
manufacture butter out of beech trees; a third was for a wheel for
driving machinery, which once started would go on forever, thereby
furnishing a cheap perpetual motion.

A fourth projector, goin