PRECEDING HOGARTH.
It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John
Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as
literature, learning, and science, was subservient to religion during
the Middle Ages, and drew its chief nourishment from Mother Church.
Since the Reformation they have all been obliged to pass through a
painful process of weaning, and each in turn to try for an independent
existence. The bubble frenzy, besides giving an impulse to the
caricaturist's art it had not before received, withdrew attention from
ecclesiastical subjects, and supplied abundant material drawn from
sources purely mundane.
[Illustration: "Shares! Shares! Shares!"
The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law
and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)]
Above all, the pictures which that mania called forth assisted to form
the great satiric artist of his time and country, William Hogarth. He
was a London apprentice carving coats of arms on silver plate when the
early symptoms of the mania appeared; and he was still a very young man,
an engraver, feeling his way to the career that awaited him, when the
broadsheets satirizing John Law began to be "adapted" from Dutch
originals, and shown in the shop-windows of London. Doubtless he
inspected the picture of the "Night Share-crier," opposite, and noticed
the cock's feather in his hat (indicating the French origin of the
delusion), and the windmill upon the top of his staff. The Dutch
pictures were full of that detail and by-play of which Hogarth was such
a master in later years.
Visitors to New York who saw tumultuous Wall Street during the worst of
our inflation period, and, following the crowd up-town, entered the
Gold-room, where the wild speculation of the day was continued till
midnight, may have flattered themselves that they were looking upon
scenes never before exhibited in this world. What a strange intensity of
excitement there was in those surging masses of young men! What fierce
outcries! What a melancholy waste of youthful energies, so much needed
elsewhere! But there was nothing new in all this, except that we passed
the crisis with _less_ loss and _less_ demoralization than any community
ever before experienced in circumstances at all similar.
When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he
left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder.
For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than
fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by
every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold
all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold
annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives,
and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to
pay, from _rentes perpetuelles_ to treasury-notes of a few francs,
payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do--reduce the
expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that
deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the
government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the
depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those
magnificent fetes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such
lustre on his reign. The fete would cost four millions, the treasury was
empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious
minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner
office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the
purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the
speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising
valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as
to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the
purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was
soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days
from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the
minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty
millions of the same notes. The king had his fete; and when next he
borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he
was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]
[Footnote 18: "Law, son Systeme et son Epoque," p. 2, par P. A. Cochut,
Paris, 1853.]
Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a
consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due
and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as
M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin
had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void;
prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes;
trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and
during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of
persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people
were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and
speculators in the king's paper; and these classes mocked the misery of
their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion.
[Illustration: Island of Madhead.
"Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea,
and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given
the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)]
The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The
regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew,
Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to
reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one
member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a
clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no
better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were
worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper,
and offered in exchange a new variety, called _billets d'etat_, bearing
interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call,
the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew down all
other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one
hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not
fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an
evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!
Then he tried a system of _squeezing_ the rich contractors and others of
the vermin class who batten on a sick body-politic. As informers were to
have half the product of the squeeze, an offended lackey had only to
denounce his master, to get him tried on a charge of having made too
much money. Woe to the plebeian who was convicted of this crime! Besides
being despoiled of his property, Paris saw him, naked to the shirt, a
rope round his neck, a penitential candle in his handcuffed hands, tied
to a dirty cart and dragged to the pillory, carrying on his back a large
label, "PLUNDERER OF THE PEOPLE." The French pillory was a revolving
platform, so that all the crowd had an equal chance to hurl mud and
execration at the fixed and pallid face. Judge if there was not a making
haste to compound with a government capable of such squeezing! There was
also a mounting in hot haste to get out of such a France. One lucky
merchant crossed the frontier, dressed as a peasant, driving a cart-load
of straw, under which was a chest of gold. A train of fourteen carts
loaded with barrels of wine was stopped, and in each barrel a keg of
gold was found, which was emptied into the royal treasury.
The universal consternation and the utter paralysis of business which
resulted from these violent spoliations may be imagined. Six thousand
persons were tried, who confessed to the possession of twelve hundred
millions of francs. The number of the condemned was four thousand four
hundred and ten, and the sum extorted from them was, nominally, nearly
four hundred millions, of which, however, less than one hundred millions
reached the treasury. It was easy for a rich man to compound. A person
condemned to disgorge twelve hundred thousand francs was visited by a
"great lord." "Give me three hundred thousand francs," said the great
lord, "and you won't be troubled for the rest." To which the merchant
replied, "Really, my lord, you come too late, for I have already made a
bargain with madame, your wife, for a hundred and fifty thousand." Thus
the business of busy and frugal France was brought to a stand without
relieving the Government. The royal coffers would not fill; the deficit
widened; the royal paper still declined; the poor were hungry; and, oh,
horror! the regent's mistresses pouted. The Government debased the coin.
But that, too, proved an aggravation of the evil.
Such was that _ancien regime_ which still has its admirers; such are the
consequences of placing a great nation under the rule of the greatest
fool in it; and such were the circumstances which gave the Scotch
adventurer, John Law, his opportunity to madden and despoil France, so
often a prey to the alien.
Two hundred years ago, when John Law, a rich goldsmith's son, was a boy
in Edinburgh, goldsmiths were dealers in coin as well as in plate, and
hence were bankers and brokers as well as manufacturers. They borrowed,
lent, exchanged, and assayed money, and therefore possessed whatever
knowledge of finance there was current in the world. It was in his
father's counting-room that John Law acquired that taste for financial
theories and combinations which distinguished him even in his youth. But
the sagacious and practical goldsmith died when his son was fourteen,
and left him a large inheritance in land and money. The example of Louis
XIV. and Charles II. having brought the low vices into high fashion
throughout Europe, it is not surprising that Law's first notoriety
should have been owing to a duel about a mistress. A man of fashion in
Europe in Louis XIV.'s time was a creature gorgeously attired in lace
and velvet, and hung about with ringlets made of horse-hair, who passed
his days in showing the world how much there was in him of the goat, the
monkey, and the pig. Law had the impudence to establish his mistress in
a respectable lodging-house, which led to his being challenged by a
gentleman who had a sister living there. Law killed his man on the
field--"not fairly," as John Evelyn records--and he was convicted of
murder. The king pardoned, but detained him in prison, from which he
escaped, went to the Continent, and resumed his career, being at once a
man of fashion, a gambler, and a connoisseur in finance. He used to
attend card-parties, followed by a footman carrying two bags, each
containing two thousand louis-d'ors, and once during the life-time of
the old king he was ordered out of Paris on the ground that he
"understood the games he had introduced into the capital _too well_."
Twenty years elapsed from the time of his flight from a London prison.
He was forty-four years of age, possessed nearly a million and
three-quarters of francs in cash, producible on the green cloth at a
day's notice, and was the most plausible talker on finance in Europe.
This last was a bad symptom, indeed, for it is well known that men who
remain victors in finance, who really do extricate estates and countries
from financial difficulties, are not apt to talk very effectively on the
subject. Successful finance is little more than paying your debts and
living within your income, neither of which affords material for
striking rhetoric. Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked finance in a
taking manner; but it was Albert Gallatin who quietly reduced the
country's debt. Fifteen days after the death of the old king, Law was in
Paris with all that he possessed, and in a few months he was deep in the
confidence of the regent. His fine person, his winning manners, his
great wealth, his constant good fortune, his fluent and plausible
tongue, his popular vices, might not have sufficed to give him
ascendency if he had not added to these the peculiar force that is
derived from sincerity. That he believed in his own "system" is shown by
his risking his whole fortune in it. And it is to his credit that the
first use he made of his influence was to show that the spoliations, the
debasing of the coin, and all measures that inspired terror, and thus
tightened unduly the clutch upon capital, could not but aggravate
financial distress.
His "system" was delightfully simple. Bear in mind that almost every one
in Paris who had any property at all held the king's paper, worth
one-quarter or one-fifth of its nominal value. Whatever project Law set
on foot, whether a royal bank, a scheme for settling and trading with
Louisiana, for commerce with the East Indies, or farming the revenues,
any one could buy shares in it on terms like these: one-quarter of the
price in coin, and three-quarters in paper at its nominal value.
The system was not immediately successful, and it was only in the teeth
of powerful opposition that he could get his first venture, the bank, so
much as authorized. Mark how clearly one of the council, the Duc de
Saint-Simon, comprehended the weakness of a despotism to which he owed
his personal importance. "An establishment," said he, "of the kind
proposed may be in itself good; but it is so only in a republic, or in
such a monarchy as England, where _the finances are controlled
absolutely by those who furnish the money_, and who furnish only as much
of it as they choose, and in the way they choose. But in a light and
changing government like that of France, solidity would be necessarily
wanting, since a king or, in his name, a mistress, a minister,
favorites, and, still more, an extreme necessity, could overturn the
bank, which would present a temptation at once too great and too easy."
Law, therefore, was obliged to alter his plan, and give his bank at
first a board of directors not connected with the Government.
Gradually the "system" made its way. The royal paper beginning to rise
in value, the holders were in good humor, and disposed to buy into other
projects on similar terms. The Louisiana scheme may serve as an example
of Law's method. Six years before, a great merchant of Paris, Antoine
Crozat, had bought from the old king the exclusive right to trade with a
vast unknown region in North America called Louisiana; but after five
years of effort and loss he became discouraged, and offered to sell his
right to the creator of the bank. Law, accepting the offer, speedily
launched a magnificent scheme: capital one hundred millions of francs,
in shares of five hundred francs, purchasable _wholly_ in those new
treasury-notes bearing four per cent. interest, then at a discount of
seventy per cent. Maps of this illimitable virgin land were published.
Pictures were exhibited, in which crowds of interesting naked savages,
male and female, were seen running up to welcome arriving Frenchmen; and
under the engraving a gaping Paris crowd could read, "In this land are
seen mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead, quicksilver; and
the savages, not knowing their value, gladly exchange pieces of gold and
silver for knives, iron pots, a small looking-glass, or even a little
brandy." One picture was addressed to pious souls; for even at that
early day, as at present, there was occasionally observed a curious
alliance between persons engaged in the promotion of piety and those
employed in the pushing of shares. This work exhibited a group of
Indians kneeling before some reverend fathers of the Society of Jesus.
Under it was written, "Indian Idolaters imploring Baptism."
[Illustration: Speculative Map of Louisiana.]
The excitement, once kindled, was stimulated by lying announcements of
the sailing of great fleets for Louisiana laden with merchandise and
colonists; of the arrival of vessels with freights worth "millions;" of
the establishment of a silk-factory, wherein twelve thousand women of
the Natchez tribe were employed; of the bringing of Louisiana ingots to
the Mint to be assayed; of the discovery in Arkansas of a great rock of
emerald, and the dispatch of Captain Laharpe with a file of twenty-two
men to take possession of the same. In 1718 Law sent engineers to
Louisiana, who did something toward laying out its future capital, which
he named New Orleans, in honor of his patron, the regent.
The royal paper rose rapidly under this new demand. Other schemes
followed, until John Law, through his various companies, seemed about to
"run" the kingdom of France by contract, farming all its revenues,
transacting all its commerce, and, best of all, paying all its debts!
Madness, ruled the hour. The depreciated paper rose, rose, and still
rose; reached par; went beyond par, until gold and silver were at a
discount of ten per cent. The street named Quincampoix, the centre and
vortex of this whirl of business, a mere lane twenty feet wide and a
quarter of a mile long, was crowded with excited people from morning
till night, and far into the night, so that the inhabitants of the
quarter sent to the police a formal complaint that they could get no
sleep. Nobles, lackeys, bishops, monks, merchants, soldiers, women,
pickpockets, foreigners, all resorted to _La Rue_, "panting, yelling,
operating, snatching papers, counting crowns," making up a scene of
noisy confusion unexampled. One man hired all the vacant houses in the
street, and made a fortune by subletting offices and desk-room, even
placing sentry-boxes on some of the roofs, and letting them at a good
price. The excitement spread over France, reached Holland, and drew to
Paris, as was estimated at the time, five hundred thousand strangers,
places in the public vehicles being engaged "two months in advance," and
commanding a high premium.
There were the most extraordinary acquisitions of fortune. People
suddenly enriched were called _Mississippiens_, and they behaved as the
victims of sudden wealth, unearned, usually do. Men who were lackeys one
week kept lackeys the next. A _garcon_ of a wine-shop gained twenty
millions. A cobbler, who had a stall in the Rue Quincampoix made of four
planks, cleared away his traps and let his boards to ladies as seats,
and sold pens, paper, and ink to operators, making two hundred francs a
day by both trades. Men gained money by hiring out their backs as
writing-desks, bending over while operators wrote out their contracts
and calculations. One little hunchback made a hundred and fifty thousand
francs by thus serving as a _pupitre ambulant_ (strolling desk), and a
broad-shouldered soldier gained money enough in the same way to buy his
discharge and retire to the country upon a pretty farm. The general
trade of the city was stimulated to such a degree that for a while the
novel spectacle was presented of a community almost every member of
which was prosperous beyond his hopes; for even in the Rue Quincampoix
itself, although some men gained more money than others, no one appeared
to lose any thing. And all this seemed the work of one man, the great,
the incomparable "Jean Lass," as he was then called in Paris. It was a
social distinction to be able to say, "I have seen him!" His carriage
could with difficulty force its way through the rapturous, admiring
crowd. Princes and nobles thronged his antechamber, a duchess publicly
kissed his hand, and the regent made him controller-general of the
finances.
This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed
it--how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague
apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize."
Dread word, REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by
Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once
suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable
rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration
upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris,
ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the
kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his
career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.
As the "system" collapsed in France, it acquired vogue in England,
where, also, it originated in the desire to get rid of the public debt
by brilliant finance instead of the homely and troublesome method of
paying it. In London, besides the original South Sea Company which began
the frenzy, there were started in the course of a few months about two
hundred joint-stock schemes, many of which, as given in Anderson's
"History of Commerce," are of almost incredible absurdity. The sum
called for by these projects was three hundred millions of pounds
sterling, which was more than the value of all the land in Great
Britain. Shares in Sir Richard Steele's "fish-pool for bringing fresh
fish to London" brought one hundred and sixty pounds a share! Men paid
seventy pounds each for "permits," which gave them merely the
_privilege_ of subscribing to a sail-cloth manufacturing company not yet
formed. There was, indeed, a great trade in "permits" to subscribe to
companies only planned. Here are a few of the schemes: for raising hemp
in Pennsylvania; "Puckle's machine gun;" settling the Bahamas; "wrecks
to be fished for on the Irish coast;" horse and cattle insurance;
"insurance and improvement of children's fortunes;" "insurance of losses
by servants;" "insurance against theft and robbery;" insuring
remittances; "to make salt-water fresh;" importing walnut-trees from
Virginia; improving the breed of horses; purchasing forfeited estates;
making oil from sunflowers; planting mulberry-trees and raising
silk-worms; extracting silver from lead; making quicksilver malleable;
capturing pirates; "for importing a number of large jackasses from Spain
in order to propagate a larger kind of mules;" trading in human hair;
"for fatting of hogs;" "for the encouragement of the industrious;"
perpetual motion; making pasteboard; furnishing funerals.
There was even a company formed and shares sold for carrying out an
"undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." The word "puts," now
so familiar in Wall Street, appears in these transactions of 1720. "Puts
and refusals" were sold in vast amounts. The prices paid for shares
during the half year of this mania were as remarkable as the schemes
themselves. South Sea shares of a hundred pounds par value reached a
thousand pounds. It was a poor share that did not sell at five times its
original price. As in France, so in England, the long heads, like Sir
Robert Walpole and Alexander Pope, began to think of "realizing" when
they had gained a thousand per cent. or so upon their ventures; and, in
a very few days, realizing, in its turn, became a mania; and all those
paper fortunes shrunk and crumpled into nothingness.
So many caricatures of these events appeared in Amsterdam and London
during the year 1720 that the collection in the British Museum, after
the lapse of a hundred and fifty-five years, contains more than a
hundred specimens. I have myself eighty, several of which include from
six to twenty-four distinct designs. Like most of the caricatures of
that period, they are of great size, and crowded with figures, each
bearing its label of words, with a long explanation in verse or prose at
the bottom of the sheet. As a rule, they are destitute of the point that
can make a satirical picture interesting after the occasion is past. In
one we see the interior of an Exchange filled with merchants running
wildly about, each uttering words appropriate to the situation: "To-day
I have gained ten thousand!" "Who has money to lend at two per cent.?"
"A strait-jacket is what I shall want;" "Damned is this wind business."
This picture, which originated in Amsterdam, is called "The Wind-buyers
paid in Wind," and it contains at the bottom three columns of
explanatory verse in Dutch, of which the following is the purport:
[Illustration: John Law, Wind Monopolist. (Amsterdam, 1720.)
"_Law loquitur._ The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation.
Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes
straightway the object of idolatry. Less rapidly turn the sails of the
windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish
enterprises."]
"Come, gentlemen, weavers, peasants, tailors! Whoever has relied on wind
for his profit can find his picture here. They rave like madmen. See the
French, the English, the Hebrew, and Jack of Bremen! Hear what a scream
the absurd Dutch are making on the exchange of Europe! There is Fortune
throwing down some charming wishes to silly mortals, while virtue, art,
and intellect are despised and impoverished in the land; shops and
counting-houses are empty; trade is ruined. All this is QUINCAMPOIX!"
The Dutch caricaturists recurred very often to the _windy_ character of
the share business. In several of their works we see a puffy wind-god
blowing up pockets to a great size, inflating share-bags, and wafting
swiftly along vehicles with spacious sails. The bellows play a
conspicuous and not always decorous part. Jean Law is exhibited as a
"wind monopolist." In one picture he appears assisting Atlas and others
to bear up great globes of wind. Kites are flying and windmills
revolving in several pictures. Pigeons fly away with shares in their
bills. The hunchback who served as a walking desk is repeated many
times. The Tower of Babel, the mad-house, the hospital, the whirligig, a
garden maze, the lottery wheel, the drum, the magic lantern, the
soap-bubble, the bladder, dice, the swing--whatever typifies pretense,
uncertainty, or confusion was brought into the service. One Dutch
broadsheet (sixteen inches by twenty), now before me, contains
fifty-four finely executed designs, each of which burlesques a scene in
Law's career, or a device of his finance, the whole making a pack of
"wind cards for playing a game of wind."
Most of the Dutch pictures were "adapted" into English, and the adapters
added verses which, in some instances, were better than the caricatures.
A few of the shorter specimens may be worth the space they occupy, and
give the reader a feeling of the situation not otherwise attainable. Of
the pictures scarcely one would either bear or reward reduction, so
large are they, so crowded with objects, and their style uninterestingly
obsolete or boorishly indecent.
On Puckle's Machine Gun:
"A rare invention to destroy the crowd
Of fools at home instead of foes abroad.
Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine--
They're only wounded that have shares therein."
On the Saltpetre Company (two and sixpence a share):
"Buy petre stock, let me be your adviser;
'Twill make you, though not richer, much the wiser."
On the German Timber Company:
"You that are rich and hasty to be poor,
Buy timber export from the German shore;
For gallowses built up of foreign wood,
If rightly used, will do Change Alley good."
On the Pennsylvania Company:
"Come all ye saints that would for little buy
Great tracts of land, and care not where they lie;
Deal with your Quaking Friends; they're men of light;
Their spirit hates deceit and scorns to bite."
On the Ship-building Company:
"To raise fresh barks must surely be amusing,
When hundreds rot in docks for want of using."
On Settling the Bahamas:
"Rare, fruitful isles, where not an ass can find
A verdant tuft or thistle to his mind.
How, then, must those poor silly asses fare
That leave their native land to settle there?"
On a South Sea Speculator imploring Alms through his Prison Bars:
"Behold a poor dejected wretch,
Who kept a S---- Sea coach of late,
But now is glad to humbly catch
A penny at the prison grate.
"What ruined numbers daily mourn
Their groundless hopes and follies past,
Yet see not how the tables turn,
Or where their money flies at last!
"Fools lost when the directors won,
But now the poor directors lose;
And where the S---- Sea stock will run,
Old Nick, the first projector, knows."
On a Picture of Change Alley:
"Five hundred millions, notes and bonds,
Our stocks are worth in value;
But neither lie in goods, or lands,
Or money, let me tell ye.
Yet though our foreign trade is lost,
Of mighty wealth we vapor,
When all the riches that we boast
Consist in scraps of paper."
On a "Permit:"
"You that have money and have lost your wits,
If you'd be poor, buy National Permits;
Their stock's in fish, the fish are still in water,
And for your coin you may go fish hereafter."
On a Roomful of Ladies buying Stocks of a Jew and a Gentile:
"With Jews and Gentiles, undismayed,
Young tender virgins mix;
Of whiskers nor of beards afraid,
Nor all their cozening tricks.
"Bright jewels, polished once to deck
The fair one's rising breast,
Or sparkle round her ivory neck,
Lie pawned in iron chest.
"The gentle passions of the mind
How avarice controls!
E'en love does now no longer find
A place in female souls."
On a Picture of a Man laughing at an Ass browsing:
"A wise man laughed to see an ass
Eat thistles and neglect good grass.
But had the sage beheld the folly
Of late transacted in Change Alley,
He might have seen worse asses there
Give solid gold for empty air,
And sell estates in hopes to double
Their fortunes by some worthless bubble,
Till of a sudden all was lost
That had so many millions cost.
Yet ruined fools are highly pleased
To see the knaves that bit 'em squeezed,
Forgetting where the money flies
That cost so many tears and sighs."
On the Silk Stocking Company:
"Deal not in stocking shares, because, I doubt,
Those that buy most will ere long go without."