NECESSITY, which is allowed to be the mother of invention, has so
violently agitated the wits of men at this time that it seems not at all
improper, by way of distinction, to call it the Projecting Age. For
though in times of war and public confusions the like humour of invention
has seemed to stir, yet, without being partial to the present, it is, I
think, no injury to say the past ages have never come up to the degree of
projecting and inventing, as it refers to matters of negotiation and
methods of civil polity, which we see this age arrived to.
Nor is it a hard matter to assign probable causes of the perfection in
this modern art. I am not of their melancholy opinion who ascribe it to
the general poverty of the nation, since I believe it is easy to prove
the nation itself, taking it as one general stock, is not at all
diminished or impoverished by this long, this chargeable war, but, on the
contrary, was never richer since it was inhabited.
Nor am I absolutely of the opinion that we are so happy as to be wiser in
this age than our forefathers; though at the same time I must own some
parts of knowledge in science as well as art have received improvements
in this age altogether concealed from the former.
The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human
knowledge, is a sufficient proof of what I say, especially in conducting
armies and in offensive engines. Witness the now ways of rallies,
fougades, entrenchments, attacks, lodgments, and a long _et cetera_ of
new inventions which want names, practised in sieges and encampments;
witness the new forts of bombs and unheard-of mortars, of seven to ten
ton weight, with which our fleets, standing two or three miles off at
sea, can imitate God Almighty Himself and rain fire and brimstone out of
heaven, as it were, upon towns built on the firm land; witness also our
new-invented child of hell, the machine which carries thunder, lightning,
and earthquakes in its bowels, and tears up the most impregnable
fortification.
But if I would search for a cause from whence it comes to pass that this
age swarms with such a multitude of projectors more than usual,
who—besides the innumerable conceptions, which die in the bringing forth,
and (like abortions of the brain) only come into the air and dissolve—do
really every day produce new contrivances, engines, and projects to get
money, never before thought of; if, I say, I would examine whence this
comes to pass, it must be thus:
The losses and depredations which this war brought with it at first were
exceeding many, suffered chiefly by the ill-conduct of merchants
themselves, who did not apprehend the danger to be really what it was:
for before our Admiralty could possibly settle convoys, cruisers, and
stations for men-of-war all over the world, the French covered the sea
with their privateers and took an incredible number of our ships. I have
heard the loss computed, by those who pretended they were able to guess,
at above fifteen millions of pounds sterling, in ships and goods, in the
first two or three years of the war—a sum which, if put into French,
would make such a rumbling sound of great numbers as would fright a weak
accountant out of his belief, being no less than one hundred and ninety
millions of _livres_. The weight of this loss fell chiefly on the
trading part of the nation, and, amongst them, on the merchants; and
amongst them, again, upon the most refined capacities, as the insurers,
&c. And an incredible number of the best merchants in the kingdom sunk
under the load, as may appear a little by a Bill which once passed the
House of Commons for the relief of merchant-insurers, who had suffered by
the war with France. If a great many fell, much greater were the number
of those who felt a sensible ebb of their fortunes, and with difficulty
bore up under the loss of great part of their estates. These, prompted
by necessity, rack their wits for new contrivances, new inventions, new
trades, stocks, projects, and anything to retrieve the desperate credit
of their fortunes. That this is probable to be the cause will appear
further thus. France (though I do not believe all the great outcries we
make of their misery and distress—if one-half of which be true, they are
certainly the best subjects in the world) yet without question has felt
its share of the losses and damages of the war; but the poverty there
falling chiefly on the poorer sort of people, they have not been so
fruitful in inventions and practices of this nature, their genius being
quite of another strain. As for the gentry and more capable sort, the
first thing a Frenchman flies to in his distress is the army; and he
seldom comes back from thence to get an estate by painful industry, but
either has his brains knocked out or makes his fortune there.
If industry be in any business rewarded with success it is in the
merchandising part of the world, who indeed may more truly be said to
live by their wits than any people whatsoever. All foreign negotiation,
though to some it is a plain road by the help of custom, yet is in its
beginning all project, contrivance, and invention. Every new voyage the
merchant contrives is a project; and ships are sent from port to port, as
markets and merchandises differ, by the help of strange and universal
intelligence—wherein some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that
a merchant sitting at home in his counting-house at once converses with
all parts of the known world. This and travel make a true-bred merchant
the most intelligent man in the world, and consequently the most capable,
when urged by necessity, to contrive new ways to live. And from hence, I
humbly conceive, may very properly be derived the projects, so much the
subject of the present discourse. And to this sort of men it is easy to
trace the original of banks, stocks, stock-jobbing, assurances, friendly
societies, lotteries, and the like.
To this may be added the long annual inquiry in the House of Commons for
ways and means, which has been a particular movement to set all the heads
of the nation at work; and I appeal, with submission, to the gentlemen of
that honourable House, if the greatest part of all the ways and means out
of the common road of land taxes, polls, and the like, have not been
handed to them from the merchant, and in a great measure paid by them
too.
However, I offer this but as an essay at the original of this prevailing
humour of the people; and as it is probable, so it is also possible to be
otherwise, which I submit to future demonstration.
Of the several ways this faculty of projecting have exerted itself, and
of the various methods, as the genius of the authors has inclined, I have
been a diligent observer and, in most, an unconcerned spectator, and
perhaps have some advantage from thence more easily to discover the _faux
pas_ of the actors. If I have given an essay towards anything new, or
made discovery to advantage of any contrivance now on foot, all men are
at the liberty to make use of the improvement; if any fraud is
discovered, as now practised, it is without any particular reflection
upon parties or persons.
Projects of the nature I treat about are doubtless in general of public
advantage, as they tend to improvement of trade, and employment of the
poor, and the circulation and increase of the public stock of the
kingdom; but this is supposed of such as are built on the honest basis of
ingenuity and improvement, in which, though I will allow the author to
aim primarily at his own advantage, yet with the circumstances of public
benefit added.
Wherefore it is necessary to distinguish among the projects of the
present times between the honest and the dishonest.
There are, and that too many, fair pretences of fine discoveries, new
inventions, engines, and I know not what, which—being advanced in notion,
and talked up to great things to be performed when such and such sums of
money shall be advanced, and such and such engines are made—have raised
the fancies of credulous people to such a height that, merely on the
shadow of expectation, they have formed companies, chose committees,
appointed officers, shares, and books, raised great stocks, and cried up
an empty notion to that degree that people have been betrayed to part
with their money for shares in a new nothing; and when the inventors have
carried on the jest till they have sold all their own interest, they
leave the cloud to vanish of itself, and the poor purchasers to quarrel
with one another, and go to law about settlements, transferrings, and
some bone or other thrown among them by the subtlety of the author to lay
the blame of the miscarriage upon themselves. Thus the shares at first
begin to fall by degrees, and happy is he that sells in time; till, like
brass money, it will go at last for nothing at all. So have I seen
shares in joint-stocks, patents, engines, and undertakings, blown up by
the air of great words, and the name of some man of credit concerned, to
£100 for a five-hundredth part or share (some more), and at last dwindle
away till it has been stock-jobbed down to £10, £12, £9, £8 a share, and
at last no buyer (that is, in short, the fine new word for
nothing-worth), and many families ruined by the purchase. If I should
name linen manufactures, saltpetre-works, copper mines, diving engines,
dipping, and the like, for instances of this, I should, I believe, do no
wrong to truth, or to some persons too visibly guilty.
I might go on upon this subject to expose the frauds and tricks of
stock-jobbers, engineers, patentees, committees, with those Exchange
mountebanks we very properly call brokers, but I have not gaul enough for
such a work; but as a general rule of caution to those who would not be
tricked out of their estates by such pretenders to new inventions, let
them observe that all such people who may be suspected of design have
assuredly this in their proposal: your money to the author must go before
the experiment. And here I could give a very diverting history of a
patent-monger whose cully was nobody but myself, but I refer it to
another occasion.
But this is no reason why invention upon honest foundations and to fair
purposes should not be encouraged; no, nor why the author of any such
fair contrivances should not reap the harvest of his own ingenuity. Our
Acts of Parliament for granting patents to first inventors for fourteen
years is a sufficient acknowledgment of the due regard which ought to be
had to such as find out anything which may be of public advantage; new
discoveries in trade, in arts and mysteries, of manufacturing goods, or
improvement of land, are without question of as great benefit as any
discoveries made in the works of nature by all the academies and royal
societies in the world.
There is, it is true, a great difference between new inventions and
projects, between improvement of manufactures or lands (which tend to the
immediate benefit of the public, and employing of the poor), and projects
framed by subtle heads with a sort of a _deceptio visus_ and legerdemain,
to bring people to run needless and unusual hazards: I grant it, and give
a due preference to the first. And yet success has so sanctified some of
those other sorts of projects that it would be a kind of blasphemy
against fortune to disallow them. Witness Sir William Phips’s voyage to
the wreck; it was a mere project; a lottery of a hundred thousand to one
odds; a hazard which, if it had failed, everybody would have been ashamed
to have owned themselves concerned in; a voyage that would have been as
much ridiculed as Don Quixote’s adventure upon the windmill. Bless us!
that folks should go three thousand miles to angle in the open sea for
pieces of eight! Why, they would have made ballads of it, and the
merchants would have said of every unlikely adventure, “It, was like
Phips’s wreck-voyage.” But it had success, and who reflects upon the
project?
“Nothing’s so partial as the laws of fate,
Erecting blockheads to suppress the great.
Sir Francis Drake the Spanish plate-fleet won;
He had been a pirate if he had got none.
Sir Walter Raleigh strove, but missed the plate,
And therefore died a traitor to the State.
Endeavour bears a value more or less,
Just as ’tis recommended by success:
The lucky coxcomb ev’ry man will prize,
And prosp’rous actions always pass for wise.”
However, this sort of projects comes under no reflection as to their
honesty, save that there is a kind of honesty a man owes to himself and
to his family that prohibits him throwing away his estate in
impracticable, improbable adventures; but still some hit, even of the
most unlikely, of which this was one of Sir William Phips, who brought
home a cargo of silver of near £200,000 sterling, in pieces of eight,
fished up out of the open sea, remote from any shore, from an old Spanish
ship which had been sunk above forty years.