6333. PANICS, Financial.—
I learn with real concern the calamities which are fallen on
New York, and which must fall on Philadelphia
also. No man of reflection who had ever attended
to the South Sea bubble, in England, or
that of Law in France, and who applied the
lessons of the past to the present time, could
fail to foresee the issue though he might not
calculate the moment at which it would happen.
The evidences of the public debt are solid
and sacred. I presume there is not a man in
the United States who would not part with his
last shilling to pay them. But all that stuff
called scrip, of whatever description, was folly
or roguery, and under a resemblance to genuine
public paper, it buoyed itself up to a par with
that. It has given a severe lesson; yet such is
the public gullibility in the hands of cunning
and unprincipled men, that it is doomed by
nature to receive these lessons once in an age
at least. Happy if they now come about and
get back into the tract of plain unsophisticated
common sense which they ought never to have
been decoyed from.—
To Francis Eppes.
Ford ed., v, 507.
(Pa.,
April. 1792)
See Banks.
