The advances in science lead to hopes of the sudden accumulation
of gold, just as the discovery of new worlds led our ancestors to
invest in many inflated enterprises of commerce and conquest. This
older temptation has passed away, for there are no new worlds to
discover, and this small globe has been practically staked out; but the
mysterious domains of science are still illimitable, and afford vast
opportunities for inflated schemes which have their prototype in the
South Sea Bubble.
Let us refresh our memory of this surprising delusion. It arose in
the reign of Queen Anne, nearly one hundred and eighty years ago, and
when we consider the extent of the speculation and gambling which it
caused and the number of those who lost everything and who consigned
their families to bitter poverty, we are tempted to class it with
those other calamities which preceded it and which afflicted England
so heavily--the great fire of London and the plague. The South Sea
Company claimed to have enormous sources of profit in certain exclusive
privileges, obtained from the Spanish Government, for trading in their
possessions in South America and Mexico; and it may be well for us in
these times of the flotation of schemes for obtaining gold from salt
water and from sands, of power from air and something more ethereal
than air, to be reminded of the many bubbles that came into existence
and burst at the time of the collapse of the South Sea Bubble.
The stock of the South Sea Company rose from one hundred to a thousand,
and an army of future victims crowded the offices of the company,
anxious to invest in what they believed would suddenly enrich them.
Indeed, all England seemed to go mad, and the craze of the time is
reflected in the writings of Pope and Swift. Pope says:
“At length corruption like a general flood
Did deluge all; and avarice creeping on,
Spread like a low-born mist, and hid the sun.
Statesmen and patriots plied alike the stocks,
Peeress and butler shared alike the box;
And judges jobbed, and bishops bit the town,
And mighty dukes packed cards for half a crown;
Britain was sunk in lucre’s sordid charms.”
The rise of the great bubble was accompanied by the formation of
hundreds of minor ones. Among these we will mention a few which are
pertinent to the subject of this paper:
A wheel for perpetual motion. Capital, one million pounds.
For extracting silver from lead.
For the transmutation of quicksilver into a malleable fine metal.
Puckles Machine Company, for discharging round and square cannon balls
and bullets, and making a total revolution in “the art of war.”
For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, “but nobody to know
what it is.”
It is estimated that the proposed capital for floating these and
similar schemes was three hundred million pounds. We find, in the
annals of the time, that the Duchess of Marlborough persuaded her
husband, John Churchill, the great general, not to increase his
holdings, and to sell his shares; he, like a sensible man, took a
sensible woman’s advice and made one hundred thousand pounds. When we
come to speak of the connection of women with modern delusions, we must
remember this act of one of their sex.
At this time, nearly two hundred years after the singular outbreak of
chimerical projects of Queen Anne’s reign, we can match some of these
bubbles almost exactly; for have we not had the Keeley motor, the
extraction of gold from salt water, and is there not great activity
in making the wonder of the public over some advance in science a
source of money-making? The unscientific person is certainly open to
a new danger in the increasing tendency to promote enterprises based
upon some new scientific discovery, and it behooves the followers of
science to suggest a remedy for this growing evil. I shall endeavor to
do my part in this paper in pointing out the necessity of some oracular
medium--a scientific oracle of Delphos--to which the common man can
repair and get trustworthy information, for it is a melancholy fact
that such information can not be obtained from the daily press or from
the literary magazines of the time.
Many of our newspapers draw such an income from their advertising
columns that the editors are unwilling to print any criticism which
would lead to the restriction of this source of gain; thus if a company
promoting a scientific bubble should advertise liberally in a leading
newspaper, the editors are usually loath to insert an article upon the
scheme, for the printing of the criticism might lead to the withdrawal
of the advertisement. It is possible that the editors of such daily
papers have not overmuch confidence in the judgment of scientific men,
for have not the latter often been mistaken? There was Lardner, who
prophesied that steamships could not cross the Atlantic, but we must
remember that Lardner was not a scientific man; he was a popularizer
of science, and never made a scientific investigation. It is said that
there have been college professors who have denied the possibility of
sending messages under the ocean. This I also doubt, for I am a witness
in the flesh of the way such stories can arise. Not long since I was
invited to speak before a commercial club, and the presiding officer,
in introducing me, remarked: “The professor will now address you on
the advances in electricity. When I was in college I well remember
his describing an electric motor and his remark that it would never
become a practical invention.” There was, of course, laughter, and the
president sat down with a comfortable air of having made a point. The
professor pointed out that the presiding officer graduated before he
became professor in the university, and before the Gramme machine and
the electric motor were invented. Nevertheless, the world loves to
believe in the inaccuracy of the accurate, and even a sophomore takes
infinite delight in discovering arithmetical mistakes in an edition of
Newton’s _Principia_.
I mention this proneness to believe that scientific men are apt to be
mistaken, for it is a blame laid at their doors often by the promoters
of scientific bubbles, and for a very easily understood reason, and the
editors of newspapers and literary magazines can ease their consciences
after publishing sensational scientific articles by reflecting on the
fallibility of the followers of science. Lawyers and judges, too,
make their mistakes; nevertheless, we continue to resort to them for
advice; and few editors, I imagine, would dare to publish a legal
opinion without consulting an authority in law. Yet we read every day
so-called scientific articles in newspapers and magazines which have
evidently never been submitted to competent critics. Have we not read
statements of the possibility of exploding powder magazines on board
ships by electric waves; of the manufacture of liquid air without the
expenditure of energy; of electricity direct from coal; papers on the
nebular theory, more nebulous than any nebula yet discovered? When we
read a broad sheet in the morning paper setting forth a glowing scheme
to manufacture power out of nothing, to what oracle can we repair to
ascertain the truth? It is true that common sense might lead the reader
to reflect that when he is told that the shares can now be obtained for
five dollars, but in a short time they will be advanced to ten dollars,
and now is the time to invest, that such good things are quickly taken
up without the necessity of advertising. When the morning mail brings
a prospectus of a company formed to make diamonds by electricity,
a company with ten million dollars capital (why not one hundred
millions?), to whom should one go to allay the fever of sudden gain?
While men and women will carefully consider which line of steamships
to Europe is the best equipped with engines, the efficiency of which
depends upon the laws that prove the impossibility of perpetual motion,
they enter at the same time upon schemes to obtain power without the
consumption of work.
We are indeed confronted with the curious fact that even so-called
intelligent people can be led to believe that what we have learned in
regard to the working of Nature may be thrown aside, and that some
new and unrelated laws may rule supreme. Thus we have what is called
Christian Science, one of the intuitional sciences which may be said
to add a new peril to matrimony. We find cultivated men believing that
a government can make money by pronouncing silver equal to gold. Thus
there are those who fondle their delusions and those who bank upon
credulity. Education seems to be ineffectual with some temperaments; on
the whole, however, it has a saving grace, and there are undoubtedly
a number in the community who would welcome a source of scientific
authority which might answer for them just as the Times does in
political and economic questions to an Englishman. The American has
especial reason to fear scientific bubbles, for our patent laws make
it comparatively easy for promoters to make a great show of vested
rights. One method is to build an imposing plant, with powerful dynamos
and with a multiplicity of electrical devices, and to capitalize for
an enormous sum an expensive plant in sight with millions in patents
of very little value. The proposed investor is taken to see the great
plant; its magnitude appeals to his reverence for size, and his
pocketbook is soon at the service of the promoter. Another method is
to select some scheme which is on the borderland between physics and
chemistry, such as the electrolytic method of obtaining gold from
salt water. There is a minute quantity of gold in salt water, and
the chemist, thinking that electricity might afford an economical
method of treating large quantities of water, is reticent in regard
to such a scheme, while the electrician, ignorant of chemistry, is
ready to concede that the chemists may have found a cheap extractor,
so the promoter can play the chemist against the electrician, and
there is no arbitrator in sight. The American is peculiarly in peril
from the absence of a large body of men trained in technical science,
such as exist in Germany. He also has been unduly excited, and his
desire for love of sudden wealth stimulated by phenomenal successes.
The commercial triumph of the telephone has led to a multitude of
scientific bubbles, and has resulted, like the discovery of gold in the
Klondike, in a rush into electrical schemes which have been held up to
a hungry crowd of victims as second only to the Bell telephone.
While the telegraph and the telephone can prevent speculations like
the South Sea Bubble in a great measure, for such schemes were much
aided by a lack of a general dissemination of intelligence, and this
lack is supplied by a quick interchange of knowledge, they bring their
own peculiar peril, for they are examples of what profit may be reaped
from discovery in the world of science. The commercial enterprises of
the world have been brought within reach of the many by the telegraph
and telephone. They no longer belong to the few, while the successful
working of the field of science is still confined to a minority and the
general public; even the cultivated people are very ignorant of the
approaches to the New El Dorado. No bogus land scheme or salted mining
enterprise can be kept in existence to-day for a long period; but the
Keeley motor, with its ethereal vibrations and its pseudo-molecular
motions, was limited in activity only by the life of the promoter.
Instead of the alchemists we have the seekers after power, which costs
nothing, and in the train of the honest inventor there are unscrupulous
promoters ready to capitalize any remarkable new fact or discovery
which attracts public attention.
I have mentioned the influence of the first Duchess of Marlborough
in inducing her husband, the great duke, to sell out his shares in
the South Sea Bubble when they had risen to a high value because this
example of discrimination and prudence in a woman supports one in the
belief that all women are not prone to invest in women’s bank schemes,
in Keeley motors, or in enterprises for “carrying on an undertaking
of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” One of my friends
recently visited the office of a company which proposed to produce
power without the expenditure of a due amount of energy, and found
among those anxious to invest a woman who said that she had just
received a dividend from the company for extracting gold from salt
water, and she was anxious to invest it in the new power company. The
dividend was the result of a liquidation of the Gold from Sea Water
Company, and represented half of her original sum. She had come out of
one delusion with a loss of half of her property, and was now ready
to enter another one with the remaining half. It was an old-fashioned
notion that women should be kept in ignorance of business, for business
knowledge, it was thought, was the concern of the husbands. This notion
prevails still in some quarters, and there may be some connection
between the number of women in Christian Science temples and their lack
of education in practical matters, or in what may be called the legal
business habit--a habit which weighs the probabilities of this and
that, and leads to ways of exact thinking.
One of the remedies for this proneness of women to invest in scientific
bubbles, to invest money on faith, is the lack of exact training,
which is not acquired by them either in private schools or colleges.
The classes of philosophy and psychology in women’s colleges are
crowded, while those in the exact sciences have only handfuls. This
remark also applies to the students in men’s colleges, and we realize
in this respect how closely college women imitate college men. They
follow the latter also in the habit of taking lecture courses, a custom
which increases vagueness, inaccuracy of thought, and looseness of
statement. This choice of studies by the young women in their colleges
is a serious question for mankind, in view of the speculative spirit
which the feminine sex show toward scientific bubbles and schemes
which promise an inordinate rate of interest; for the graduates of
these colleges will become teachers of youth, and if not teachers
they have an influence upon the coming citizen during his formative
period. As teachers they will far outnumber men teachers, and they are
fast coming into competition with men also in the routine of business
offices and in certain positions in commercial houses. In these
activities they will need a balance of judgment, exactness of thought,
and business habits. They should be given a sufficient knowledge of
the elements of physical science to know that power can not be created
from nothing, and that the great mass of our knowledge of mechanics
and of the relation of electricity to mechanics can not be overturned
by any new discovery. Whatever is discovered must be related to what
has preceded it. This is a characteristic of a science, and this is
what distinguishes it from a delusion--namely, the great body of
related facts put upon a mechanical basis, so that any fact can be
substantiated and any phenomenon repeated. When this latter test is
applied to many of the isms of the day they fade into thin air, and
young women need especially to be taught to apply such a test. It
would seem as if the present choice of study by women students tended
to intensify vagueness of thought rather than to correct it, to keep
them in ignorance of business habits rather than to educate them in the
balance of judgment on economic questions.
Women are born speculators, and are peculiarly prone to invest money
and heart in bubbles. Being the power behind the throne, they can
carry men into action, and it seems to me that especial attention
should be paid in women’s colleges to the studies that cultivate
accurate thought and business methods. A certain amount of the study
of scientific methods and a study of common law might take the place
of the study of philosophy, psychology, and biology, certainly in the
first years of a woman’s college course, for psychology and biology are
studies which demand long scientific training and maturity of thought.
Recently I heard the following conversation at a bank in Cambridge.
The cashier was speaking with a young lady: “Miss ----, your friend has
overdrawn her account three hundred dollars, and you say she has left
Cambridge.” “Yes, the trouble with Jane is she is too much educated.”
A long residence in a university town makes one wary of educational
theories, but the proneness of women to invest in women’s banks and
bogus trust companies certainly seems to need a corrective in a new
college curriculum. Men can indulge in delusions and can recover
mental balance, and perhaps their fortunes; but women are apt to
become bankrupt permanently. Their experience in business delusions is
similar to that in affairs of the heart. Washington Irving says of this
feminine attribute:
“She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole
soul in the traffic of affection, and if shipwrecked her case is
hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”
More mathematics and science, and less philosophy and psychology, might
correct that vagueness of thought which leads both men and women into
delusion.
Now for our other remedies. Shall we have an academy which shall issue
storm warnings of scientific bubbles? I fear that the influence of
academies is waning, and that the conviction that there are as many
good men outside of the academy as inside would militate against their
dicta. We could have courts of scientific appeal, with judges appointed
by the State to sit on scientific questions of perplexity, and to
sift expert opinions. Such a constitution of scientific courts might
be a good thing in several ways--a saving health to the public. The
college professor would certainly be greatly relieved of endeavors of
promoters to use the name and reputation of the professor’s university,
and incidentally the little his own name might add. This remedial
solution is not in sight, and we must direct our vision in another
direction. We know that the newspaper can not serve us, for we seek to
kill sensations, and it seeks to live on them. We are bound to turn to
some journal or periodical which will publish only what it considers
sound science and will eschew sensational science; a journal which,
just as the London Times is regarded as the authority on political and
economical questions, will be looked up to as an authority on matters
of science.
In order, therefore, to protect the public against scientific bubbles
we must impress upon both men and women the fact that an education in
science is desirable, and is becoming more important as the world grows
older; but until a scientific education becomes more general, it is
important that there should be some scientific oracle of Delphos, and
I can not think of any better than a well-managed scientific journal,
the editors of which will seek for the best information on scientific
questions which interest the financial world. When it is known that
such a journal admits to its pages nothing that is sensational, when it
is realized that the best specialists contribute to it, surely it will
become a saving help in times of trouble.