en, as at first suggested. The bank resolved
not to be outbidden in this singular auction, and the governors also
reconsidered their first proposal, and sent in a new one.

Thus, each corporation having made two proposals, the house began to
deliberate. Mr. Robert Walpole was the chief speaker in favour of the
bank, and Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the principal
advocate on behalf of the South-Sea Company. It was resolved, on the 2d of
February, that the proposals of the latter were most advantageous to the
country. They were accordingly received, and leave was given to bring in a
bill to that effect.

Exchange Alley was in a fever of excitement. The company's stock, which
had been at a hundred and thirty the previous day, gradually rose to three
hundred, and continued to rise with the most astonishing rapidity during
the whole time that the bill in its several stages was under discussion.
Mr. Walpole was almost the only statesman in the House who spoke out
boldly against it. He warned them, in eloquent and solemn language, of the
evils that would ensue. It countenanced, he said, "the dangerous practice
of stock-jobbing, and would divert the genius of the nation from trade and
industry. It would hold out a dangerous lure to decoy the unwary to their
ruin, by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect
of imaginary wealth. The great principle of the project was an evil of
first-rate magnitude; it was to raise artificially the value of the stock,
by exciting and keeping up a general infatuation, and by promising
dividends out of funds which could never be adequate to the purpose." In a
prophetic spirit he added, that if the plan succeeded, the directors would
become masters of the government, form a new and absolute aristocracy in
the kingdom, and control the resolutions of the legislature. If it failed,
which he was convinced it would, the result would bring general discontent
and ruin upon the country. Such would be the delusion, that when the evil
day came, as come it would, the people would start up, as from a dream,
and ask themselves if these things could have been true. All his eloquence
was in vain. He was looked upon as a false prophet, or compared to the
hoarse raven, croaking omens of evil. His friends, however, compared him
to Cassandra, predicting evils which would only be believed when they came
home to men's hearths, and stared them in the face at their own boards.
Al