Читать книгу John Law of Lauriston. Financier and Statesman, Founder of the Bank of France, Originator of the Mississippi Scheme, Etc онлайн

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The varied information which Law in this way acquired during his residence on the Continent, and especially in the great banking centres, he did not store as a mere mass of bare interesting facts. Whether the investigations he assiduously pursued were the outcome of a design to develop a new system of banking, or proceeded merely from the attraction of the subject, is matter of doubt. But it is clear that he abstracted certain principles of finance from the data he had gathered, and that these principles were heterodox according to the opinions of his contemporaries. Our judgment upon Law must be largely determined by our impression as to whether these principles were logically deduced explanations of the financial phenomena he observed, or whether they were the fanciful ideas of his own imagination for the justification of which he sifted his phenomena. It is extremely difficult to arrive at any definite conclusion. His own published writings give no guiding clue, and the records of his time confuse, rather than enlighten, by their contradictory and varied explanations of his schemes. It is probable that the principles upon which they were founded possessed an element of both possibilities. His observations on the one hand would seem to indicate to his mind some underlying law; and on the other hand his mind, impressed with the beauty and simplicity of some vast ambitious scheme of finance, would readily discover support in its favour from the deductions he had made. At no time did Law attempt to build up a system of financial philosophy, but he must be given due praise for laying down propositions bearing upon the subject of credit and of the use of paper money which have stood the test of time and received recognition from political economists of our own day. He must also be raised to a higher level than a mere financial schemer. His proposals were more than plausible. They had an element of practicability, in which he demonstrated his own belief by his readiness to put them to test under private direction before they were launched with sovereign authority and under public control. Convinced so thoroughly as he was with the soundness of his theories, and with the possibilities they opened up, if adopted, of infusing new life and new energy into the commercial world of his day, he regarded himself as a man with an important mission.