Or I repeat my own lines, written in my Clerk state: Who first invented work-and bound the free To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town- He, and his thoughts, keep pensive worky-day! O this divine Leisure!-Reader, if thou art furnished with the Old Series of the London, turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will see my present condition there touched in a "Wish" by a daintier pen than I can pretend to. I subscribe to that Sonnet toto corde. A man can never have too much time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down As low as to the fiends. I am no longer Js D―n, Clerk to the Firm of, &c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. Í walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself. Beaufort-Terrace, Regent-street; Late of Ironmonger's-court, Fenchurch-street. J. D. [Lond. Mag. SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM. STANZAS. "Sweet Spirit of the forest wild !" Sweet Spirit of the forest wild! Now hush'd in silence deep, Woods, wind, and waves are as a child Still smiling though in sleep. 1 I feel thy breathings on my brow I see thy hues on yonder sky The dew drops 'mid the leaves of green, Methinks from beauteous eyes unseen, may be: Oh! would that one upon my heart Might drop thus brightly fair, Sweet Spirit! wherefore should we not And hear from dell, or stream, or grot, Then glad might we forsake the throng And find, far lovelier scenes among, [New Monthly Mag. SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM. THE JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES. Ir is difficult while watching those excitements which stir up at times certain classes of the community, often uncontrollable in force, and undefinable in their effects, at first, to assign them their due measure of good and evil. They must be judged of in their totality; and yet to try them all by the example of one which may have casually come in our way, whether good or bad of its kind, is manifestly wrong. It is necessary to bring the most impartial feeling to the investigation, and to separate every thing extraneous from the question; for in such out-breakings something good is always found. We must not suffer previous notions to interfere, nor the idea that the abandoning preconceived opinions upon the subject, is for a moment to be considered disgraceful to us, when on being put in competition with sound reason and simple principles, they are found erroneous. The great desideratum is to get at the truth; and we must not be afraid of visiting her even at the bottom of her well. Still less must the prejudices of the past be suffered to blind our eyes to future benefits; we must boldly sacrifice them all. That the world can never get beyond infancy in foreknowledge, is a law of nature; things therefore which now appear of small importance, time may change into enterprises "of great pith and moment"-into matters of infinite concern to the industry of the country, and to the accumulation of the means of national prosperity. The impulses from which national benefits frequently accrue, arising from certain passions in the body politic, like those in the individual body, can seldom be duly regulated at the moment. By and by, however, they subside, and begin to show that they do not exist in vain. The rage for joint-stock companies has made this apparent in a remarkable manner. Not only the schemes of monied and respectable men have been speedily seconded, but new ones of all sorts formed, many of which have no other object than to entrap the unwary, and supply means for supporting a system of gambling by which enormous sums are gained and lost. As long as attorneys could grasp the costs of a new scheme, it was brought into the market, and then they prowled around for more prey. The shares were bought and sold to the cost of the speculatist and the profit of the wary planner of the system of plunder -the bubble of the moment. Those who belonged to the old and blind school of political economy, cried out for the legislature to interfere, that legislature which had just emancipated itself from the trammels of our former financial dotage, and begun a new career upon sound principles and a more enlightened policy. The Lord Chancellor in particular was loud in his reprobation of these companies; but their constitution and the peculiar circumstances attending them, required, if they were to be regulated by the legislature, some one to take them in hand better versed in political economy than his lordship. His lordship's declarations respecting them had, however, one good effect, namely, that they in some measure kept back many daring adventurers from appearing with their bubbles, by the fear of a scrutiny; and they caused persons who wished to be purchasers of shares in new companies, to inquire more closely into their respectability;-thus far they did * *His lordship proposed that two-thirds of the money should be lodged as a security at the time of obtaining a legislative enactment for the establishment of a company. But his lordship should have known that such a proceeding, in mining companies in particular, would be highly mischievous. When the sum wanted could be pretty nearly estimated, as in railway and canal companies, &c. &c. much inconvenience might not arise by locking up the capital at once; but in mining, a share-holder is called upon for small sums only at a time, and the ultimate outlay may not amount to more than one-third or one-half of the capital proposed. It is hard, therefore, that the adventurer's money must be kept almost profitless for years, when he may make it return him fifteen or twenty per cent. in trade. In mining, the largest possible sum is always named to secure the undertaking against contingencies. One of the Mexican mining companies, before expending a fourth of the sum allotted for one of its mines, is not only paying all the current expenses, but realizing a large sum from it by the discovery of an accidental vein. Would it not be hard that the remainder of the capital should be laid by unproductive? The care which is shown for the property of speculators in these concerns is misplaced. When have city men, and men of business in general, been incautious in looking after their gold? They certainly do not need in this respect the protective and sympathizing guardianship of the opponents of free trade principles! good. Messrs. Robinson and Huskisson, however, with more sound discretion, while they lamented the evil arising from the excessive stimulus abroad, preferred leaving things to find their own level; and they accordingly bid fair to do so, without any very fearful consequences to the community. A few speculatists will suffer, and some persons dip pretty largely into their superfluous capital, which has been thereby put into circulation before it otherwise might. The bulk of the public can sustain no injury by its shifting hands a little, and the real and bonâ-fide companies will be of considerable use to the industry and commerce of the country. The bubbles will explode the spring, the elasticity of which had forced it out of form, will soon return to its proper shape. If, however, unprincipled men sought in many cases to swindle the too eager speculatist, it must be granted that the fear of those who looked on the exacerbation of the speculative spirit was excessive. They were wedded to old things; and, like the Lord Chancellor, had a pious horror for what was out of a jog-trot pace over the old beaten track: they were grossly ignorant of the true state of the modern principles of trade and commerce; and when they endeavoured to draw a comparison between the South-Sea bubbles and the bubbles of 1825, they exhibited a deplorable ignorance of facts with which at first they might easily have made themselves acquainted. The character of joint-stock companies and the South-Sea adventure differ ab origine. The present speculations are made with surplus unemployed capital, which no period of our history has shown we ever before possessed to a fraction of its present extent. In the South-Sea adventure people of all classes ventured, as in a lottery, their entire fortunes and means of subsistence, led by two or three besotted persons. They were destitute of any medium of acquiring a knowledge for themselves of remote points connected with the speculation in which they hazarded their all. In our day, every individual not only possesses channels of correct information, but uses them before he trades, for trading is more the term for the present proceedings as in contradistinction to the South-Sea adventure. The speculators at present have superfluous money, of which they seek to make a profit. This superfluous cash would else lie idle, or be locked up in the funds at a very unprofitable rate of interest. The present therefore has the character of a speculation in a superfluous commodity, or at most an adventure of the money the speculatist possesses unemployed. The objectors to them seem never to have objected to foreign loans. Now railways, canals, and mining in England or America, are objects that expose to less risk of ultimate loss than loans to the despots of the Continent. Austria shuffled us out of part of £17,000,000 which she got as a loan of the nation. Now in the event of war with these powers, where is the interest to come from, when most needed? The money is locked up until a peace, and then a few shillings in the pound are all that in human probability would ever be recovered. So drained are the great States of the Continent after a war, that if they had the inclination, and were not given to cheat and evade, and appoint commissions to sit half a century to examine debts which they feel are just, they have not then the means to pay.* Jointstock companies for foreign objects (always of course including the idea of their being bona fide what they pretend to be,) employ their capital among States with which we can have little cause to fear a rupture. But passing by these topics, and the fallacious projects that like weeds have grown up with the crop, it is proper that we proceed to make some inquiry into the principal object of our research. It will be granted that some half dozen of the companies formed in the city, which are headed by and divided among men of respectability and property, will be really carried into effect to the full extent of the proposed means. The present paper is penned merely to show that in all those impulses which chance, unemployed capital, or new adventures in manufactures may give, when sobered down, that they seldom fail to produce beneficial consequences, and with this view to endeavour, as generally and briefly as possible, to examine whether we should gain by the success of schemes too extended for individual capital to undertake, but easy of performance by a union of the means and power of many. Those who are of the old school in trade and politics, may style such an inquiry theoretical. Like his highness of York, they may stand in the breach the champions of past prejudices, and still obstinately keep their position when all the world has abandoned them. best reply for such persons is, to point to the effects of candid exposition, liberal action, and sound judgment in our financial affairs, and contrast them with the mean, shuffling and capricious measures of the "good old times" gone by forever, even in imitation, it is to be fervently hoped. The Let us then beg a question, and suppose half a dozen of these companies to carry their intentions honestly into action. Let us suppose one a railway company at home, (or any thing but Sir Thomas Lethbridge's Utopian canal,) that is of magnitude too great for individual enterprise; and another a mining company abroad; and that these are prosecuted diligently to the object in view, with all the care and frugality, and all the effective force necessary. It will not be denied that, if a railway can be so constructed as to convey goods eight miles, and passengers twelve or fifteen miles an hour,t another step in social improvement is obtained, and that the present has gained a fresh triumph over the We have already seen in the newspapers that on a decline in the foreign funds, the adventures in the New World have uniformly risen. † A greater speed is believed to be practicable, but the enormous increase of the price of iron has for a time paralyzed those rail-road undertakings that are engaged in May not good be boná-fide reasonably expected from this mode of carriage united with steam, of which it is impossible to foretell the extent? VOL. VII. No. 38.—Museum. U |