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Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds
By Charles MacKay
1841
N'en deplaise a ces fous nommes
sages de Grece;
En ce monde
il n'est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgre tous leurs soins,
Ne different entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
-- BOILEAU.
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have
their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and
recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities
suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that
millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run
after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating
than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its
lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly
becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its
senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and
tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe
its population lost their wits about the Sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in
frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land: another age went mad for fear of the
Devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of
witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the
Philosopher's Stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit.
It was once thought a venial offence in very many countries of Europe to
destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would
have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage
without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of
murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some
delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages,
flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations as among the early
barbarians with whom they originated, -- that of duelling, for instance, and
the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the
progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely from the popular mind. Money,
again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have
all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon
the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of
these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said,
think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
In the present state of civilization,
society has often shown itself very prone to run a career of folly from the
last-mentioned cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in a most
extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness, set the first great
example, and was very soon imitated by England with her South Sea Bubble. At an
earlier period, Holland made herself still more
ridiculous in the eyes of the world, by the frenzy which came over her people
for the love of Tulips. Melancholy as all these delusions were in their
ultimate results, their history is most amusing. A more ludicrous and yet
painful spectacle, than that which Holland presented in the years 1635 and
1636, or France in 1719 and 1720, can hardly be imagined. Taking them in the
order of their importance, we shall commence our history with John Law and the
famous Mississippi scheme of the years above mentioned.