hat also?
These were the two motives which induced me to attack, and to risk all
or nothing, for I was as certainly lost one way as another. I threw up
intrenchments against intrenchments: I knew a little more upon that
subject than my comrade the grand vizier; and I had plenty of troops in
health to guard them. I obliged him for want of provisions--for, as I
have already said, I caused all the country in his rear to be
ravaged--to decamp, and, consequently, Belgrad to surrender. Thus, if
this manuscript should be read, give me neither praise, my dear reader,
nor blame. After all, I extricated myself, perhaps, as Charles VI said,
his confessor, and the pious souls who trust in God, and who wished me
at the Devil, by the protection of the Virgin Mary, for the battle was
fought on Assumption Day.

Europe was getting embroiled elsewhere. Some charitable souls advised
the Emperor to send me to negotiate at London, reckoning that they might
procure for another the easy glory of terminating the war.

I was not such a fool as to fall into this snare, and I set off for
Hungary at the commencement of June, with a fine sword worth eighty
thousand florins which the Emperor had presented to me.

BURSTING OF THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE

A.D. 1720

LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS

Never, perhaps, was there a time when rash monetary speculation
seized with a firmer grip upon people and governments than during
the early part of the eighteenth century. Concurrently with the
delusive "Mississippi Scheme" of John Law (1717), which resulted in
financial panic in France, a similarly disastrous enterprise was
carried on in England. This was the attempt to turn the South Sea
Company into a concern for enriching quickly both its private and
its governmental investors. The collapse of this scheme, in the same
year as that of Law's, caused even more serious and widespread ruin.

Thiers' relation of the origin and development of the South Sea
Company, of the forming and collapse of the "bubble," and of the
spread of the speculative mania which manifested itself in so many
other extravagant projects, makes a fitting counterpart to this
historian's narrative of the rise and fall of the contemporary
scheme in his own country.

The South Sea Company was originated by the celebrated Harley, Earl of
Oxford, in the year 1711, with the view of restoring public credit,
which had suffered by the d