Defence of Usury [32]
on the favourable side. True it is, that in the jumble of occurrences, an over-sanguine projector may stumble upon a patron as over-sanguine as himself; and the wishes may bribe the judgment of the one, as they did of the other. The opposite case, however, you will allow, I think, to be by much the more natural. Whatever a man's wishes may be for the success of an enterprize not yet his own, his fears are likely to be still stronger. That same pretty generally implanted principle of vanity and self-conceit, which disposes most of us to over-value each of us his own conceptions, disposes us, in a proportionable degree, to undervalue those of other men. Is it worth adding, though it be undeniably true, that could it even be proved, by ever so uncontrovertible evidence, that, from the beginning of time to the present day, there never was a project that did not terminate in the ruin of its author, not even from such a fact as this could the legislator derive any sufficient warrant, so much as for wishing to see the spirit of projects in any degree repressed? The discouraging motto, Sic vos non vobis, may be matter of serious consideration to the individual, but what is it to the legislator? What general, let him attack with ever so superior an army, but knows that hundreds, or perhaps thousands, must perish at the first onset? Shall he, for that consideration alone, lie inactive in his lines? "Every man for himself -- but God," adds the proverb (and it might have added the general, and the legislator, and all other public servants), "for us all." Those sacrifices of individual to general welfare, which, on so many occasions, are made by third persons against men's wills, shall the parties themselves be restrained from making, when they do it of their own choice? To tie men neck and heels, and throw them into the gulphs I have been speaking of, is altogether out of the question: but if at every gulph a Curtius stands mounted and caparisoned, ready to take the leap, is it for the legislator, in a fit of old-womanish tenderness, to pull him away? laying even public interest out of the question, and considering nothing but the feelings of the individuals immediately concerned, a legislator would scarcely do so, who knew the value of hope, "the most precious gift of heaven." Consider, Sir, that it is not with the invention-lottery (that great branch of the project-lottery, for the sake of which I am defending the whole, and must continue so to do until you or somebody else can shew me how to defend it on better terms), it is not I say with the invention-lottery, as with the mine-lottery, the privateering-lottery, and so many other lotteries, which you speak of, and in no. instance, I think, very much to their advantage. In these lines, success does not, as in this, arise out of the embers of ill success, and thence propagate itself, by a happy contagion, perhaps to all eternity. let Titius have found a mine, it is not the more easy, but by so much the less easy, for Sempronius to find one too: let Titius have made a capture, it is not the more easy, but by so much the less easy, for Sempronius to do the like. But let Titius have found out a new dye, more brilliant or more durable than those in use, let him have invented a new and more convenient machine, or a new and more profitable mode of husbandry, a thousand dyers, ten thousand mechanics, a hundred thousand husbandmen, may repeat and multiply his success: and then, what is it to the public, though the fortune of Titius, or of his usurer. should have sunk under the experiment? Birmingham and Sheffield are pitched upon by you as examples, the one of a projecting town, the other of an unprojecting one.(31*) Can you forgive my saying, I rather wonder that this comparison of your own chosing, did not suggest some suspicions of the justice of the conceptions you had taken up, to the disadvantage of projectors. Sheffield is an old oak: Birmingham, but a mushroom. What if we should find the mushroom still vaster and more vigorous than the oak? Not but the one as well as the