MAN is the worst of all God’s creatures to shift for himself; no other
animal is ever starved to death; nature without has provided them both
food and clothes, and nature within has placed an instinct that never
fails to direct them to proper means for a supply; but man must either
work or starve, slave or die. He has indeed reason given him to direct
him, and few who follow the dictates of that reason come to such unhappy
exigences; but when by the errors of a man’s youth he has reduced himself
to such a degree of distress as to be absolutely without three
things—money, friends, and health—he dies in a ditch, or in some worse
place, a hospital.
Ten thousand ways there are to bring a man to this, and but very few to
bring him out again.
Death is the universal deliverer, and therefore some who want courage to
bear what they see before them, hang themselves for fear; for certainly
self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme.
Others break the bounds of laws to satisfy that general law of nature,
and turn open thieves, house-breakers, highwaymen, clippers, coiners,
&c., till they run the length of the gallows, and get a deliverance the
nearest way at St. Tyburn.
Others, being masters of more cunning than their neighbours, turn their
thoughts to private methods of trick and cheat, a modern way of thieving
every jot as criminal, and in some degree worse than the other, by which
honest men are gulled with fair pretences to part from their money, and
then left to take their course with the author, who skulks behind the
curtain of a protection, or in the Mint or Friars, and bids defiance as
well to honesty as the law.
Others, yet urged by the same necessity, turn their thoughts to honest
invention, founded upon the platform of ingenuity and integrity.
These two last sorts are those we call projectors; and as there was
always more geese than swans, the number of the latter are very
inconsiderable in comparison of the former; and as the greater number
denominates the less, the just contempt we have of the former sort
bespatters the other, who, like cuckolds, bear the reproach of other
people’s crimes.
A mere projector, then, is a contemptible thing, driven by his own
desperate fortune to such a strait that he must be delivered by a
miracle, or starve; and when he has beat his brains for some such miracle
in vain, he finds no remedy but to paint up some bauble or other, as
players make puppets talk big, to show like a strange thing, and then cry
it up for a new invention, gets a patent for it, divides it into shares,
and they must be sold. Ways and means are not wanting to swell the new
whim to a vast magnitude; thousands and hundreds of thousands are the
least of his discourse, and sometimes millions, till the ambition of some
honest coxcomb is wheedled to part with his money for it, and then
(_nascitur ridiculus mus_) the adventurer is left to carry on the
project, and the projector laughs at him. The diver shall walk at the
bottom of the Thames, the saltpetre maker shall build Tom T—d’s pond into
houses, the engineers build models and windmills to draw water, till
funds are raised to carry it on by men who have more money than brains,
and then good-night patent and invention; the projector has done his
business and is gone.
But the honest projector is he who, having by fair and plain principles
of sense, honesty, and ingenuity brought any contrivance to a suitable
perfection, makes out what he pretends to, picks nobody’s pocket, puts
his project in execution, and contents himself with the real produce as
the profit of his invention.