See R. Lanciani inMonumenti dei Lincei, xiii. (1903), 133 seq.; xvi. (1906), 241 seq.
See R. Lanciani inMonumenti dei Lincei, xiii. (1903), 133 seq.; xvi. (1906), 241 seq.
(T. As.)
LAVISSE, ERNEST(1842- ), French historian, was born at Nouvion-en-Thiérache, Aisne, on the 17th of December 1842. In 1865 he obtained a fellowship in history, and in 1875 became a doctor of letters; he was appointedmaître de conférence(1876) at the école normale supérieure, succeeding Fustel de Coulanges, and then professor of modern history at the Sorbonne (1888), in the place of Henri Wallon. He was an eloquent professor and very fond of young people, and played an important part in the revival of higher studies in France after 1871. His knowledge of pedagogy was displayed in his public lectures and his addresses, in his private lessons, where he taught a small number of pupils the historical method, and in his books, where he wrotead probandumat least as much asad narrandum: class-books, collections of articles, intermingled with personal reminiscences (Questions d’enseignement national, 1885;Études et étudiants, 1890;À propos de nos écoles, 1895), rough historical sketches (Vue générale de l’histoire politique de l’Europe, 1890), &c. Even his works of learning, written without a trace of pedantry, are remarkable for their lucidity and vividness.
After the Franco-Prussian War Lavisse studied the development of Prussia and wroteÉtude sur l’une des origines de la monarchie prussienne, ou la Marche de Brandebourg sous la dynastie ascanienne, which was his thesis for his doctor’s degree in 1875, andÉtudes sur l’histoire de la Prusse(1879). In connexion with his study of the Holy Roman Empire, and the cause of its decline, he wrote a number of articles which were published in theRevue des Deux Mondes; and he wroteTrois empereurs d’Allemagne(1888),La Jeunesse du grand Frédéric(1891) andFrédéric II. avant son avènement(1893) when studying the modern German empire and the grounds for its strength. With his friend Alfred Rambaud he conceived the plan ofL’Histoire générale du IVesiècle jusqu’à nos jours, to which, however, he contributed nothing. He edited theHistoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la Révolution(1901- ), in which he carefully revised the work of his numerous assistants, reserving the greatest part of the reign of Louis XIV. for himself. Thissection occupies the whole of volume vii. It is a remarkable piece of work, and the sketch of absolute government in France during this period has never before been traced with an equal amount of insight and brilliance. Lavisse was admitted to the Académie Française on the death of Admiral Jurien de la Gravière in 1892, and after the death of James Darmesteter became editor of theRevue de Paris. He is, however, chiefly a master of pedagogy. When the école normale was joined to the university of Paris, Lavisse was appointed director of the new organization, which he had helped more than any one to bring about.
LAVOISIER, ANTOINE LAURENT(1743-1794), French chemist, was born in Paris on the 26th of August 1743. His father, anavocat au parlement, gave him an excellent education at the collège Mazarin, and encouraged his taste for natural science; and he studied mathematics and astronomy with N. L. de Lacaille, chemistry with the elder Rouelle and botany with Bernard de Jussieu. In 1766 he received a gold medal from the Academy of Sciences for an essay on the best means of lighting a large town; and among his early work were papers on the analysis of gypsum, on thunder, on the aurora and on congelation, and a refutation of the prevalent belief that water by repeated distillation is converted into earth. He also assisted J. E. Guettard (1715-1786) in preparing his mineralogical atlas of France. In 1768, recognized as a man who had both the ability and the means for a scientific career, he was nominatedadjoint chimisteto the Academy, and in that capacity made numerous reports on the most diverse subjects, from the theory of colours to water-supply and from invalid chairs to mesmerism and the divining rod. The same year he obtained the position ofadjointto Baudon, one of the farmers-general of the revenue, subsequently becoming a full titular member of the body. This was the first of a series of posts in which his administrative abilities found full scope. Appointedrégisseur des poudresin 1775, he not only abolished the vexatious search for saltpetre in the cellars of private houses, but increased the production of the salt and improved the manufacture of gunpowder. In 1785 he was nominated to the committee on agriculture, and as its secretary drew up reports and instructions on the cultivation of various crops, and promulgated schemes for the establishment of experimental agricultural stations, the distribution of agricultural implements and the adjustment of rights of pasturage. Seven years before he had started a model farm at Fréchine, where he demonstrated the advantages of scientific methods of cultivation and of the introduction of good breeds of cattle and sheep. Chosen a member of the provincial assembly of Orleans in 1787, he busied himself with plans for the improvement of the social and economic conditions of the community by means of savings banks, insurance societies, canals, workhouses, &c.; and he showed the sincerity of his philanthropical work by advancing money out of his own pocket, without interest, to the towns of Blois and Romorantin, for the purchase of barley during the famine of 1788. Attached in this same year to thecaisse d’escompte, he presented the report of its operations to the national assembly in 1789, and as commissary of the treasury in 1791 he established a system of accounts of unexampled punctuality. He was also asked by the national assembly to draw up a new scheme of taxation in connexion with which he produced a reportDe la richesse territoriale de la France, and he was further associated with committees on hygiene, coinage, the casting of cannon, &c., and was secretary and treasurer of the commission appointed in 1790 to secure uniformity of weights and measures.
In 1791, when Lavoisier was in the middle of all this official activity, the suppression of the farmers-general marked the beginning of troubles which brought about his death. His membership of that body was alone sufficient to make him an object of suspicion; his administration at therégie des poudreswas attacked; and Marat accused him in theAmi du Peupleof putting Paris in prison and of stopping the circulation of air in the city by themur d’octroierected at his suggestion in 1787. The Academy, of which as treasurer at the time he was a conspicuous member, was regarded by the convention with no friendly eyes as being tainted with “incivism,” and in the spring of 1792 A. F. Fourcroy endeavoured to persuade it to purge itself of suspected members. The attempt was unsuccessful, but in August of the same year Lavoisier had to leave his house and laboratory at the Arsenal, and in November the Academy was forbidden until further orders to fill up the vacancies in its numbers. Next year, on the 1st of August, the convention passed a decree for the uniformity of weights and measures, and requested the Academy to take measures for carrying it out, but a week later Fourcroy persuaded the same convention to suppress the Academy together with other literary societiespatentées et dotéesby the nation. In November it ordered the arrest of the ex-farmers-general, and on the advice of the committee of public instruction, of which Guyton de Morveau and Fourcroy were members, the names of Lavoisier and others were struck off from the commission of weights and measures. The fate of the ex-farmers-general was sealed on the 2nd of May 1794, when, on the proposal of Antoine Dupin, one of their former officials, the convention sent them for trial by the Revolutionary tribunal. Within a week Lavoisier and 27 others were condemned to death. A petition in his favour addressed to Coffinhal, the president of the tribunal, is said to have been met with the replyLa République n’a pas besoin de savants, and on the 8th of the month Lavoisier and his companions were guillotined at the Place de la Révolution. He died fourth, and was preceded by his colleague Jacques Paulze, whose daughter he had married in 1771. “Il ne leur a fallu,” Lagrange remarked, “qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tête, et cent années peut-être ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable.”
Lavoisier’s name is indissolubly associated with the overthrow of the phlogistic doctrine that had dominated the development of chemistry for over a century, and with the establishment of the foundations upon which the modern science reposes. “He discovered,” says Justus von Liebig (Letters on Chemistry, No. 3), “no new body, no new property, no natural phenomenon previously unknown; but all the facts established by him were the necessary consequences of the labours of those who preceded him. His merit, his immortal glory, consists in this—that he infused into the body of the science a new spirit; but all the members of that body were already in existence, and rightly joined together.” Realizing that the total weight of all the products of a chemical reaction must be exactly equal to the total weight of the reacting substances, he made the balance theultima ratioof the laboratory, and he was able to draw correct inferences from his weighings because, unlike many of the phlogistonists, he looked upon heat as imponderable. It was by weighing that in 1770 he proved that water is not converted into earth by distillation, for he showed that the total weight of a sealed glass vessel and the water it contained remained constant, however long the water was boiled, but that the glass vessel lost weight to an extent equal to the weight of earth produced, his inference being that the earth came from the glass, not from the water. On the 1st of November 1772 he deposited with the Academy a sealed note which stated that sulphur and phosphorus when burnt increased in weight because they absorbed “air,” while the metallic lead formed from litharge by reduction with charcoal weighed less than the original litharge because it had lost “air.” The exact nature of the airs concerned in the processes he did not explain until after the preparation of “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen) by Priestley in 1774. Then, perceiving that in combustion and the calcination of metals only a portion of a given volume of common air was used up, he concluded that Priestley’s new air,air éminemment pur, was what was absorbed by burning phosphorus, &c., “non-vital air,” azote, or nitrogen remaining behind. The gas given off in the reduction of metallic calces by charcoal he at first supposed to be merely that contained in the calx, but he soon came to understand that it was a product formed by the union of the charcoal with the “dephlogisticated air” in the calx. In a memoir presented to the Academy in 1777, but not published till 1782,he assigned to dephlogisticated air the name oxygen, or “acid-producer,” on the supposition that all acids were formed by its union with a simple, usually non-metallic, body; and having verified this notion for phosphorus, sulphur, charcoal, &c., and even extended it to the vegetable acids, he naturally asked himself what was formed by the combustion of “inflammable air” (hydrogen). This problem he had attacked in 1774, and in subsequent years he made various attempts to discover the acid which, under the influence of his oxygen theory, he expected would be formed. It was not till the 25th of June 1783 that in conjunction with Laplace he announced to the Academy that water was the product formed by the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, but by that time he had been anticipated by Cavendish, to whose prior work, however, as to that of several other investigators in other matters, it is to be regretted that he did not render due acknowledgment. But a knowledge of the composition of water enabled him to storm the last defences of the phlogistonists. Hydrogen they held to be the phlogiston of metals, and they supported this view by pointing out that it was liberated when metals were dissolved in acids. Considerations of weight had long prevented Lavoisier from accepting this doctrine, but he was now able to explain the process fully, showing that the hydrogen evolved did not come from the metal itself, but was one product of the decomposition of the water of the dilute acid, the other product, oxygen, combining with the metal to form an oxide which in turn united with the acid. A little later this same knowledge led him to the beginnings of quantitative organic analysis. Knowing that the water produced by the combustion of alcohol was not pre-existent in that substance but was formed by the combination of its hydrogen with the oxygen of the air, he burnt alcohol and other combustible organic substances, such as wax and oil, in a known volume of oxygen, and, from the weight of the water and carbon dioxide produced and his knowledge of their composition, was able to calculate the amounts of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen present in the substance.
Up to about this time Lavoisier’s work, mainly quantitative in character, had appealed most strongly to physicists, but it now began to win conviction from chemists also. C. L. Berthollet, L. B. Guyton de Morveau and A. F. Fourcroy, his collaborators in the reformed system of chemical terminology set forth in 1787 in theMéthode denomenclaturechimique, were among the earliest French converts, and they were followed by M. H. Klaproth and the German Academy, and by most English chemists except Cavendish, who rather suspended his judgment, and Priestley, who stubbornly clung to the opposite view. Indeed, though the partisans of phlogiston did not surrender without a struggle, the history of science scarcely presents a second instance of a change so fundamental accomplished with such ease. The spread of Lavoisier’s doctrines was greatly facilitated by the defined and logical form in which he presented them in hisTraité élémentaire de chimie(présenté dans un ordre nouveau et d’après les découvertes modernes) (1789). The list of simple substances contained in the first volume of this work includes light and caloric with oxygen, azote and hydrogen. Under the head of “oxidable or acidifiable” substances, the combination of which with oxygen yielded acids, were placed sulphur, phosphorus, carbon, and the muriatic, fluoric and boracicradicals. The metals, which by combination with oxygen became oxides, were antimony, silver, arsenic, bismuth, cobalt, copper, tin, iron, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, gold, platinum, lead, tungsten and zinc; and the “simple earthy salifiable substances” were lime, baryta, magnesia, alumina and silica. The simple nature of the alkalies Lavoisier considered so doubtful that he did not class them as elements, which he conceived as substances which could not be further decomposed by any known process of analysis—les molécules simples et indivisibles qui composent les corps. The union of any two of the elements gave rise to binary compounds, such as oxides, acids, sulphides, &c. A substance containing three elements was a binary compound of the second order; thus salts, the most important compounds of this class, were formed by the union of acids and oxides, iron sulphate, for instance, being a compound of iron oxide with sulphuric acid.
In addition to his purely chemical work, Lavoisier, mostly in conjunction with Laplace, devoted considerable attention to physical problems, especially those connected with heat. The two carried out some of the earliest thermochemical investigations, devised apparatus for measuring linear and cubical expansions, and employed a modification of Joseph Black’s ice calorimeter in a series of determinations of specific heats. Regarding heat (matière de feuorfluide igné) as a peculiar kind of imponderable matter, Lavoisier held that the three states of aggregation—solid, liquid and gas—were modes of matter, each depending on the amount ofmatière de feuwith which the ponderable substances concerned were interpenetrated and combined; and this view enabled him correctly to anticipate that gases would be reduced to liquids and solids by the influence of cold and pressure. He also worked at fermentation, respiration and animal heat, looking upon the processes concerned as essentially chemical in nature. A paper discovered many years after his death showed that he had anticipated later thinkers in explaining the cyclical process of animal and vegetable life, for he pointed out that plants derive their food from the air, from water, and in general from the mineral kingdom, and animals in turn feed on plants or on other animals fed by plants, while the materials thus taken up by plants and animals are restored to the mineral kingdom by the breaking-down processes of fermentation, putrefaction and combustion.
A complete edition of the writings of Lavoisier,Œuvres de Lavoisier, publiées par les soins du ministre de l’instruction publique, was issued at Paris in six volumes from 1864-1893. This publication comprises hisOpuscules physiques et chimiques(1774), many memoirs from the Academy volumes, and numerous letters, notes and reports relating to the various matters on which he was engaged. At the time of his death he was preparing an edition of his collected works, and the portions ready for the press were published in two volumes asMémoires de chimiein 1805 by his widow (in that year married to Count Rumford), who had drawn and engraved the plates in hisTraité élémentaire de chimie(1789).Sec E. Grimaux,Lavoisier 1743-1794, d’après sa correspondance, ses manuscripts, &c. (1888), which gives a list of his works; P. E. M. Berthelot,La Révolution chimique: Lavoisier(1890), which contains an analysis of and extracts from his laboratory notebooks.
A complete edition of the writings of Lavoisier,Œuvres de Lavoisier, publiées par les soins du ministre de l’instruction publique, was issued at Paris in six volumes from 1864-1893. This publication comprises hisOpuscules physiques et chimiques(1774), many memoirs from the Academy volumes, and numerous letters, notes and reports relating to the various matters on which he was engaged. At the time of his death he was preparing an edition of his collected works, and the portions ready for the press were published in two volumes asMémoires de chimiein 1805 by his widow (in that year married to Count Rumford), who had drawn and engraved the plates in hisTraité élémentaire de chimie(1789).
Sec E. Grimaux,Lavoisier 1743-1794, d’après sa correspondance, ses manuscripts, &c. (1888), which gives a list of his works; P. E. M. Berthelot,La Révolution chimique: Lavoisier(1890), which contains an analysis of and extracts from his laboratory notebooks.
LA VOISIN.Catherine Monvoisin, known as “La Voisin” (d. 1680), French sorceress, whose maiden name was Catherine Deshayes, was one of the chief personages in the famousaffaire des poisons, which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV. Her husband, Monvoisin, was an unsuccessful jeweller, and she practised chiromancy and face-reading to retrieve their fortunes. She gradually added the practice of witchcraft, in which she had the help of a renegade priest, Étienne Guibourg, whose part was the celebration of the “black mass,” an abominable parody in which the host was compounded of the blood of a little child mixed with horrible ingredients. She practised medicine, especially midwifery, procured abortion and provided love powders and poisons. Her chief accomplice was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage, whose real name was Adam Cœuret. The great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous wealth. Among her clients were Olympe Mancini, comtesse de Soissons, who sought the death of the king’s mistress, Louise de la Vallière; Mme de Montespan, Mme de Gramont (la belleHamilton) and others. The bones of toads, the teeth of moles, cantharides, iron filings, human blood and human dust were among the ingredients of the love powders concocted by La Voisin. Her knowledge of poisons was not apparently so thorough as that of less well-known sorcerers, or it would be difficult to account for La Vallière’s immunity. The art of poisoning had become a regular science. The death of Henrietta, duchess of Orleans, was attributed, falsely it is true, to poison, and the crimes of Marie Madeleine de Brinvilliers (executed in 1676) and her accomplices were still fresh in the public mind. In April 1679 a commission appointed to inquire into the subject and to prosecute the offenders met for the first time. Its proceedings, including some suppressed in the official records, are preserved in the notes of one of the officialrapporteurs, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. The revelation of the treacherous intentionof Mme de Montespan to poison Louis XIV. and of other crimes, planned by personages who could not be attacked without scandal which touched the throne, caused Louis XIV. to close thechambre ardente, as the court was called, on the 1st of October 1680. It was reopened on the 19th of May 1681 and sat until the 21st of July 1682. Many of the culprits escaped through private influence. Among these were Marie Anne Mancini, duchesse de Bouillon, who had sought to get rid of her husband in order to marry the duke of Vendôme, though Louis XIV. banished her to Nérac. Mme de Montespan was not openly disgraced, because the preservation of Louis’s own dignity was essential, and some hundred prisoners, among them the infamous Guibourg and Lesage, escaped the scaffold through the suppression of evidence insisted on by Louis XIV. and Louvois. Some of these were imprisoned in various fortresses, with instructions from Louvois to the respective commandants to flog them if they sought to impart what they knew. Some innocent persons were imprisoned for life because they had knowledge of the facts. La Voisin herself was executed at an early stage of the proceedings, on the 20th of February 1680, after a perfunctory application of torture. The authorities had every reason to avoid further revelations. Thirty-five other prisoners were executed; five were sent to the galleys and twenty-three were banished. Their crimes had furnished one of the most extraordinary trials known to history.
See F. Ravaisson,Archives de la Bastille, vols. iv.-vii. (1870-1874); the notes of La Reynie, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale; F. Funck-Brentano,Le Drame des poisons(1899); A. Masson,La Sorcellerie et la science des poisons au XVIIesiècle(1904). Sardou made the affair a background for hisAffaire des poisons(1907). There is a portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel, which has been often reproduced.
See F. Ravaisson,Archives de la Bastille, vols. iv.-vii. (1870-1874); the notes of La Reynie, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale; F. Funck-Brentano,Le Drame des poisons(1899); A. Masson,La Sorcellerie et la science des poisons au XVIIesiècle(1904). Sardou made the affair a background for hisAffaire des poisons(1907). There is a portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel, which has been often reproduced.
LAW, JOHN(1671-1729), Scots economist, best known as the originator of the “Mississippi scheme,” was born at Edinburgh in April 1671. His father, a goldsmith and banker, bought shortly before his death, which took place in his son’s youth, the lands of Lauriston near Edinburgh. John lived at home till he was twenty, and then went to London. He had already studied mathematics, and the theory of commerce and political economy, with much interest; but he was known rather as fop than scholar. In London he gambled, drank and flirted till in April 1694 a love intrigue resulted in a duel with Beau Wilson in Bloomsbury Square. Law killed his antagonist, and was condemned to death. His life was spared, but he was detained in prison. He found means to escape to Holland, then the greatest commercial country in Europe. Here he observed with close attention the practical working of banking and financial business, and conceived the first ideas of his celebrated “system.” After a few years spent in foreign travel, he returned to Scotland, then exhausted and enraged by the failure of the Darien expedition (1695-1701). He propounded plans for the relief of his country in a work1entitledMoney and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for supplying the Nation with Money(1705). This attracted some notice, but had no practical effect, and Law again betook himself to travel. He visited Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Genoa, Rome, making large sums by gambling and speculation, and spending them lavishly. He was in Paris in 1708, and made some proposals to the government as to their financial difficulties, but Louis XIV. declined to treat with a “Huguenot,” and d’Argenson, chief of the police, had Law expelled as a suspicious character. He had, however, become intimately acquainted with the duke of Orleans, and when in 1715 that prince became regent, Law at once returned to Paris.
The extravagant expenditure of the late monarch had plunged the kingdom into apparently inextricable financial confusion. The debt was 3000 million livres, the estimated annual expenditure, exclusive of interest payments, 148 million livres, and the income about the same. The advisability of declaring a national bankruptcy was seriously discussed, and though this plan was rejected, measures hardly less violent were carried. By avisa, or examination of the state liabilities by a committee with full powers of quashing claims, the debt was reduced nearly a half, the coin in circulation was ordered to be called in and reissued at the rate of 120 for 100—a measure by which foreign coiners profited greatly, and a chamber of justice was established to punish speculators, to whom the difficulties of the state were ascribed. These measures had so little success that thebillets d’étatwhich were issued as part security for the new debt at once sank 75% below their nominal value. At this crisis Law unfolded a vast scheme to the perplexed regent. A royal bank was to manage the trade and currency of the kingdom, to collect the taxes, and to free the country from debt. The council of finance, then under the duc de Noailles, opposed the plan, but the regent allowed Law to take some tentative steps. By an edict of 2nd May 1716, a private institution calledLa Banque générale, and managed by Law, was founded. The capital was 6 million livres, divided into 1200 shares of 5000 livres, payable in four instalments, one-fourth in cash, three-fourths inbillets d’état. It was to perform the ordinary functions of a bank, and had power to issue notes payable at sight in the weight and value of the money mentioned at day of issue. The bank was a great and immediate success. By providing for the absorption of part of the state paper it raised the credit of the government. The notes were a most desirable medium of exchange, for they had the element of fixity of value, which, owing to the arbitrary mint decrees of the government, was wanting in the coin of the realm. They proved the most convenient instruments of remittance between the capital and the provinces, and they thus developed the industries of the latter. The rate of interest, previously enormous and uncertain, fell first to 6 and then to 4%; and when another decree (10th April 1717) ordered collectors of taxes to receive notes as payments, and to change them for coin at request, the bank so rose in favour that it soon had a note-issue of 60 million livres. Law now gained the full confidence of the regent, and was allowed to proceed with the development of the “system.”
The trade of the region about the Mississippi had been granted to a speculator named Crozat. He found the undertaking too large, and was glad to give it up. By a decree of August 1717 Law was allowed to establish theCompagnie de la Louisiane ou d’Occident, and to endow it with privileges practically amounting to sovereignty over the most fertile region of North America. The capital was 100 million livres divided into 200,000 shares of 500 livres. The payments were to be one-fourth in coin and three-fourths inbillets d’état. On these last the government was to pay 3 million livres interest yearly to the company. As the state paper was depreciated the shares fell much below par. The rapid rise of Law had made him many enemies, and they took advantage of this to attack the system. D’Argenson, now head of the council of finance, with the brothers Paris of Grenoble, famous tax farmers of the day, formed what was called the “anti-system.” The farming of the taxes was let to them, under an assumed name, for 48½ million livres yearly. A company was formed, the exact counterpart of the Mississippi company. The capital was the same, divided in the same manner, but the payments were to be entirely in money. The returns from the public revenue were sure; those from the Mississippi scheme were not. Hence the shares of the latter were for some time out of favour. Law proceeded unmoved with the development of his plans. On the 4th of December 1718 the bank became a government institution under the name ofLa Banque royale. Law was director, and the king guaranteed the notes. The shareholders were repaid in coin, and, to widen the influenceof the new institution, the transport of money between towns where it had branches was forbidden. The paper-issue now reached 110 millions. Law had such confidence in the success of his plans that he agreed to take over shares in the Mississippi company at par at a near date. The shares began rapidly to rise. The next move was to unite the companiesDes Indes OrientalesandDe Chine, founded in 1664 and 1713 respectively, but now dwindled away to a shadow, to his company. The united association,La Compagnie des Indes, had a practical monopoly of the foreign trade of France. These proceedings necessitated the creation of new capital to the nominal amount of 25 million livres. The payment was spread over 20 months. Every holder of four original shares (mères) could purchase one of the new shares (filles) at a premium of 50 livres. All these 500-livre shares rapidly rose to 750, or 50% above par. Law now turned his attention to obtaining additional powers within France itself. On the 25th of July 1719 an edict was issued granting the company for nine years the management of the mint and the coin-issue. For this privilege the company paid 5 million livres, and the money was raised by a new issue of shares of the nominal value of 500 livres, but with a premium of other 500. The list was only open for twenty days, and it was necessary to present fourmèresand onefillein order to obtain one of the new shares (petites filles). At the same time two dividends per annum of 6% each were promised. Again there was an attempt to ruin the bank by the commonplace expedient of making a run on it for coin; but the conspirators had to meet absolute power managed with fearlessness and skill. An edict appeared reducing, at a given date, the value of money, and those who had withdrawn coin from the bank hastened again to exchange it for the more stable notes. Public confidence in Law was increased, and he was enabled rapidly to proceed with the completion of the system. A decree of 27th August 1719 deprived the rival company of the farming of the revenue, and gave it to theCompagnie des Indesfor nine years in return for an annual payment of 52 million livres. Thus at one blow the “anti-system” was crushed. One thing yet remained; Law proposed to take over the national debt, and manage it on terms advantageous to the state. The mode of transfer was this. The debt was over 1500 million livres. Notes were to be issued to that amount, and with these the state creditors must be paid in a certain order. Shares were to be issued at intervals corresponding to the payments, and it was expected that the notes would be used in buying them. The government was to pay 3% for the loan. It had formerly been bound to pay 80 millions, it would now pay under 50, a clear gain of over 30. As the shares of the company were almost the only medium for investment, the transfer would be surely effected. The creditors would now look to the government payments and the commercial gains of the company for their annual returns. Indeed the creditors were often not able to procure the shares, for each succeeding issue was immediately seized upon, though the 500-livre share was now issued at a premium of 4500 livres. After the third issue, on the 2nd of October, the shares immediately resold at 8000 livres in the Rue Quincampoix, then used as a bourse. They went on rapidly rising as new privileges were still granted to the company. Law had now more than regal power. The exiled Stuarts paid him court; the proudest aristocracy in Europe humbled themselves before him; and his liberality made him the idol of the populace. After, as a necessary preliminary, becoming a Catholic, he was made controller-general of the finances in place of d’Argenson. Finally, in February 1720, the bank was in name as well as in reality united to the company.
The system was now complete; but it had already begun to decay. In December 1719 it was at its height. The shares had then amounted to 20,000 livres, forty times their nominal price. A sort of madness possessed the nation. Men sold their all and hastened to Paris to speculate. The population of the capital was increased by an enormous influx of provincials and foreigners. Trade received a vast though unnatural impulse. Everybody seemed to be getting richer, no one poorer. Those who could still reflect saw that this prosperity was not real. The whole issue of shares at the extreme market-price valued 12,000 million livres. It would require 600 million annual revenue to give a 5% dividend on this. Now, the whole income of the company as yet was hardly sufficient to pay 5% on the original capital of 1677 million livres. The receipts from the taxes, &c., could be precisely calculated, and it would be many years before the commercial undertakings of the company—with which only some trifling beginning had been made—would yield any considerable return. People began to sell their shares, and to buy coin, houses, land—anything that had a stable element of value in it. There was a rapid fall in the shares, a rapid rise in all kinds of property, and consequently a rapid depreciation of the paper money. Law met these new tendencies by a succession of the most violent edicts. The notes were to bear a premium over specie. Coin was only to be used in small payments, and only a small amount was to be kept in the possession of private parties. The use of diamonds, the fabrication of gold and silver plate, was forbidden. A dividend of 40% on the original capital was promised. By several ingenious but fallaciously reasoned pamphlets Law endeavoured to restore public confidence. The shares still fell. At last, on the 5th of March 1720, an edict appeared fixing their price at 9000 livres, and ordering the bank to buy and sell them at that price. The fall now was transferred to the notes, of which there were soon over 2500 million livres in circulation. A large proportion of the coined money was removed from the kingdom. Prices rose enormously. There was everywhere distress and complete financial confusion. Law became an object of popular hatred. He lost his court influence, and was obliged to consent to a decree (21st May 1720) by which the notes and consequently the shares were reduced to half their nominal value. This created such a commotion that its promoters were forced to recall it, but the mischief was done. What confidence could there be in the depreciated paper after such a measure? Law was removed from his office, and his enemies proceeded to demolish the “system.” A vast number of shares had been deposited in the bank. These were destroyed. The notes were reconverted into government debt, but there was first avisawhich reduced that debt to the same size as before it was taken over by the company. The rate of interest was lowered, and the government now only pledged itself to pay 37 instead of 80 millions annually. Finally the bank was abolished, and the company reduced to a mere trading association. By November the “system” had disappeared. With these last measures Law, it may well be believed, had nothing to do. He left France secretly in December 1720, resumed his wandering life, and died at Venice, poor and forgotten, on the 21st of March 1729.
Of Law’s writings the most important for the comprehension of the “system” is hisMoney and Trade Considered. In this work he says that national power and wealth consist in numbers of people, and magazines of home and foreign goods. These depend on trade, and that on money, of which a greater quantity employs more people; but credit, if the credit have a circulation, has all the beneficial effects of money. To create and increase instruments of credit is the function of a bank. Let such be created then, and let its notes be only given in return for land sold or pledged. Such a currency would supply the nation with abundance of money; and it would have many advantages, which Law points out in detail, over silver. The bank or commission was to be a government institution, and its profits were to be spent in encouraging the export and manufacture of the nation. A very evident error lies at the root of the “system.” Money is not the result but the cause of wealth, he thought. To increase it then must be beneficial, and the best way is by a properly secured paper currency. This is the motive force; but it is to be applied in a particular way. Law had a profound belief in the omnipotence of government. He saw the evils of minor monopolies, and of private farming of taxes. He proposed to centre foreign trade and internal finance in one huge monopoly managed by the state for the people, and carrying on business through a plentiful supply of paper money. He did not see that trade and commerce are best left to private enterprise, and that such a scheme would simply result in the profits of speculators and favourites. The “system” was never so far developed as to exhibit its inherent faults. The madness of speculators ruined the plan when only its foundations were laid. One part indeed might have been saved. The bank was not necessarily bound to the company, and had its note-issue been retrenched it might have become a permanentinstitution. As Thiers points out, the edict of the 5th of March 1720, which made the shares convertible into notes, ruined the bank without saving the company. The shares had risen to an unnatural height, and they should have been allowed to fall to their natural level. Perhaps Law felt this to be impossible. He had friends at court whose interests were involved in the shares, and he had enemies eager for his overthrow. It was necessary to succeed completely or not at all; so Law, a gambler to the core, risked and lost everything. Notwithstanding the faults of the “system,” its author was a financial genius of the first order. He had the errors of his time; but he propounded many truths as to the nature of currency and banking then unknown to his contemporaries. The marvellous skill which he displayed in adapting the theory of the “system” to the actual condition of things in France, and in carrying out the various financial transactions rendered necessary by its development, is absolutely without parallel. His profound self-confidence and belief in the truth of his own theories were the reasons alike of his success and his ruin. He never hesitated to employ the whole force of a despotic government for the definite ends which he saw before him. He left France poorer than he entered it, yet he was not perceptibly changed by his sudden transitions of fortune. Montesquieu visited him at Venice after his fall, and has left a description of him touched with a certain pathos. Law, he tells us, was still the same in character, perpetually planning and scheming, and, though in poverty, revolving vast projects to restore himself to power, and France to commercial prosperity.The fullest account of the Mississippi scheme is that of Thiers,Law et son système des finances(1826, American trans. 1859). See also Heymann,Law und sein System(1853); Pierre Bonnassieux,Les Grandes Compagnies de commerce(1892); S. Alexi,John Law und sein System(1885); E. Levasseur,Récherches historiques sur le système de Law(1854); and Jobez,Une Préface au socialisme, ou le système de Law et la chasse aux capitalistes(1848). Full biographical details are given in Wood’sLife of Law(Edinburgh, 1824). All Law’s later writings are to be found in Daire,Collection des principaux économistes, vol. i. (1843). Other works on Law are: A. W. Wiston-Glynn,John Law of Lauriston(1908); P. A. Cachut,The Financier Law, his Scheme and Times(1856); A. Macf. Davis,An Historical Study of Law’s System(Boston, 1887); A. Beljame,La Pronunciation du nom de Jean Law le financier(1891). See also E. A. Benians inCamb. Mod. Hist.vi. 6 (1909). For minor notices see Poole’sIndex to Periodicals. There is a portrait of Law by A. S. Belle in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Of Law’s writings the most important for the comprehension of the “system” is hisMoney and Trade Considered. In this work he says that national power and wealth consist in numbers of people, and magazines of home and foreign goods. These depend on trade, and that on money, of which a greater quantity employs more people; but credit, if the credit have a circulation, has all the beneficial effects of money. To create and increase instruments of credit is the function of a bank. Let such be created then, and let its notes be only given in return for land sold or pledged. Such a currency would supply the nation with abundance of money; and it would have many advantages, which Law points out in detail, over silver. The bank or commission was to be a government institution, and its profits were to be spent in encouraging the export and manufacture of the nation. A very evident error lies at the root of the “system.” Money is not the result but the cause of wealth, he thought. To increase it then must be beneficial, and the best way is by a properly secured paper currency. This is the motive force; but it is to be applied in a particular way. Law had a profound belief in the omnipotence of government. He saw the evils of minor monopolies, and of private farming of taxes. He proposed to centre foreign trade and internal finance in one huge monopoly managed by the state for the people, and carrying on business through a plentiful supply of paper money. He did not see that trade and commerce are best left to private enterprise, and that such a scheme would simply result in the profits of speculators and favourites. The “system” was never so far developed as to exhibit its inherent faults. The madness of speculators ruined the plan when only its foundations were laid. One part indeed might have been saved. The bank was not necessarily bound to the company, and had its note-issue been retrenched it might have become a permanentinstitution. As Thiers points out, the edict of the 5th of March 1720, which made the shares convertible into notes, ruined the bank without saving the company. The shares had risen to an unnatural height, and they should have been allowed to fall to their natural level. Perhaps Law felt this to be impossible. He had friends at court whose interests were involved in the shares, and he had enemies eager for his overthrow. It was necessary to succeed completely or not at all; so Law, a gambler to the core, risked and lost everything. Notwithstanding the faults of the “system,” its author was a financial genius of the first order. He had the errors of his time; but he propounded many truths as to the nature of currency and banking then unknown to his contemporaries. The marvellous skill which he displayed in adapting the theory of the “system” to the actual condition of things in France, and in carrying out the various financial transactions rendered necessary by its development, is absolutely without parallel. His profound self-confidence and belief in the truth of his own theories were the reasons alike of his success and his ruin. He never hesitated to employ the whole force of a despotic government for the definite ends which he saw before him. He left France poorer than he entered it, yet he was not perceptibly changed by his sudden transitions of fortune. Montesquieu visited him at Venice after his fall, and has left a description of him touched with a certain pathos. Law, he tells us, was still the same in character, perpetually planning and scheming, and, though in poverty, revolving vast projects to restore himself to power, and France to commercial prosperity.
The fullest account of the Mississippi scheme is that of Thiers,Law et son système des finances(1826, American trans. 1859). See also Heymann,Law und sein System(1853); Pierre Bonnassieux,Les Grandes Compagnies de commerce(1892); S. Alexi,John Law und sein System(1885); E. Levasseur,Récherches historiques sur le système de Law(1854); and Jobez,Une Préface au socialisme, ou le système de Law et la chasse aux capitalistes(1848). Full biographical details are given in Wood’sLife of Law(Edinburgh, 1824). All Law’s later writings are to be found in Daire,Collection des principaux économistes, vol. i. (1843). Other works on Law are: A. W. Wiston-Glynn,John Law of Lauriston(1908); P. A. Cachut,The Financier Law, his Scheme and Times(1856); A. Macf. Davis,An Historical Study of Law’s System(Boston, 1887); A. Beljame,La Pronunciation du nom de Jean Law le financier(1891). See also E. A. Benians inCamb. Mod. Hist.vi. 6 (1909). For minor notices see Poole’sIndex to Periodicals. There is a portrait of Law by A. S. Belle in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
(F. Wa.)
1A work entitledProposals and Reasons for constituting a Council of Trade in Scotlandwas published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1701. It was republished at Glasgow in 1751 with Law’s name attached; but several references in the state papers of the time mention William Paterson (1658-1719), founder of the Bank of England, as the author of the plan therein propounded. Even if Law had nothing to do with the composition of the work, he must have read it and been influenced by it. This may explain how it contains the germs of many of the developments of the “system.” Certainly the suggestion of a central board, to manage great commercial undertakings, to furnish occupation for the poor, to encourage mining, fishing and manufactures, and to bring about a reduction in the rate of interest, was largely realized in the Mississippi scheme. See Bannister’s Life of William Paterson (ed. 1858), andWritings of William Paterson(2nd ed., 3 vols., 1859).
1A work entitledProposals and Reasons for constituting a Council of Trade in Scotlandwas published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1701. It was republished at Glasgow in 1751 with Law’s name attached; but several references in the state papers of the time mention William Paterson (1658-1719), founder of the Bank of England, as the author of the plan therein propounded. Even if Law had nothing to do with the composition of the work, he must have read it and been influenced by it. This may explain how it contains the germs of many of the developments of the “system.” Certainly the suggestion of a central board, to manage great commercial undertakings, to furnish occupation for the poor, to encourage mining, fishing and manufactures, and to bring about a reduction in the rate of interest, was largely realized in the Mississippi scheme. See Bannister’s Life of William Paterson (ed. 1858), andWritings of William Paterson(2nd ed., 3 vols., 1859).
LAW, WILLIAM(1686-1761), English divine, was born at King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire. In 1705 he entered as a sizar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; in 1711 he was elected fellow of his college and was ordained. He resided at Cambridge, teaching and taking occasional duty until the accession of George I., when his conscience forbade him to take the oaths of allegiance to the new government and of abjuration of the Stuarts. His Jacobitism had already been betrayed in a tripos speech which brought him into trouble; and he was now deprived of his fellowship and became a non-juror. For the next few years he is said to have been a curate in London. By 1727 he was domiciled with Edward Gibbon (1666-1736) at Putney as tutor to his son Edward, father of the historian, who says that Law became “the much honoured friend and spiritual director of the whole family.” In the same year he accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and resided with him as governor, in term time, for the next four years. His pupil then went abroad, but Law was left at Putney, where he remained in Gibbon’s house for more than ten years, acting as a religious guide not only to the family but to a number of earnest-minded folk who came to consult him. The most eminent of these were the two brothers John and Charles Wesley, John Byrom the poet, George Cheyne the physician and Archibald Hutcheson, M.P. for Hastings. The household was dispersed in 1737. Law was parted from his friends, and in 1740 retired to King’s Cliffe, where he had inherited from his father a house and a small property. There he was presently joined by two ladies: Mrs Hutcheson, the rich widow of his old friend, who recommended her on his death-bed to place herself under Law’s spiritual guidance, and Miss Hester Gibbon, sister to his late pupil. This curious trio lived for twenty-one years a life wholly given to devotion, study and charity, until the death of Law on the 9th of April 1761.
Law was a busy writer under three heads:—1.Controversy.—In this field he had no contemporary peer save perhaps Richard Bentley. The first of his controversial works wasThree Letters to the Bishop of Bangor(1717), which were considered by friend and foe alike as one of the most powerful contributions to the Bangorian controversy on the high church side. Thomas Sherlock declared that “Mr Law was a writer so considerable that he knew but one good reason why his lordship did not answer him.” Law’s next controversial work wasRemarks on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees(1723), in which he vindicates morality on the highest grounds; for pure style, caustic wit and lucid argument this work is remarkable; it was enthusiastically praised by John Sterling, and republished by F. D. Maurice. Law’sCase of Reason(1732), in answer to Tindal’sChristianity as old as the Creationis to a great extent an anticipation of Bishop Butler’s famous argument in theAnalogy. In this work Law shows himself at least the equal of the ablest champion of Deism. HisLetters to a Lady inclined to enter the Church of Romeare excellent specimens of the attitude of a high Anglican towards Romanism. His controversial writings have not received due recognition, partly because they were opposed to the drift of his times, partly because of his success in other fields.2.Practical Divinity.—TheSerious Call to a Devout and Holy Life(1728), together with its predecessor,A Treatise of Christian Perfection(1726), deeply influenced the chief actors in the great Evangelical revival. The Wesleys, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, Thomas Scott and Thomas Adam all express their deep obligation to the author. TheSerious Callaffected others quite as deeply. Samuel Johnson, Gibbon, Lord Lyttelton and Bishop Horne all spoke enthusiastically of its merits; and it is still the only work by which its author is popularly known. It has high merits of style, being lucid and pointed to a degree. In a tract entitledThe Absolute Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments(1726) Law was tempted by the corruptions of the stage of the period to use unreasonable language, and incurred some effective criticism from John Dennis inThe Stage Defended.3.Mysticism.—Though the least popular, by far the most interesting, original and suggestive of all Law’s works are those which he wrote in his later years, after he had become an enthusiastic admirer (not a disciple) of Jacob Boehme, the Teutonic theosophist. From his earliest years he had been deeply impressed with the piety, beauty and thoughtfulness of the writings of the Christian mystics, but it was not till after his accidental meeting with the works of Boehme, about 1734, that pronounced mysticism appeared in his works. Law’s mystic tendencies divorced him from the practical-minded Wesley, but in spite of occasional wild fancies the books are worth reading. They areA Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors of a late Book called a “Plain Account, &c., of the Lord’s Supper” (1737);The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Regeneration(1739);An Appeal to all that Doubt and Disbelieve the Truths of Revelation(1740);An Earnest and Serious Answer to Dr Trapp’s Sermon on being Righteous Overmuch(1740);The Spirit of Prayer(1749, 1752);The Way to Divine Knowledge(1752);The Spirit of Love(1752, 1754);A Short but Sufficient Confutation of Dr Warburton’s Projected Defence(as he calls it)of Christianity in his “Divine Legation of Moses”(1757);A Series of Letters(1760); aDialogue between a Methodist and a Churchman(1760); andAn Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy(1761).Richard Tighe wrote a short account of Law’s life in 1813. See also Christopher Walton,Notes and Materials for a Complete Biography of W. Law(1848); Sir Leslie Stephen,English Thought in the 18th century, and in theDict. Nat. Biog.(xxxii. 236); W. H. Lecky,History of England in the 18th Century; C. J. Abbey,The English Church in the 18th Century; and J. H. Overton,William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic(1881).
Law was a busy writer under three heads:—
1.Controversy.—In this field he had no contemporary peer save perhaps Richard Bentley. The first of his controversial works wasThree Letters to the Bishop of Bangor(1717), which were considered by friend and foe alike as one of the most powerful contributions to the Bangorian controversy on the high church side. Thomas Sherlock declared that “Mr Law was a writer so considerable that he knew but one good reason why his lordship did not answer him.” Law’s next controversial work wasRemarks on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees(1723), in which he vindicates morality on the highest grounds; for pure style, caustic wit and lucid argument this work is remarkable; it was enthusiastically praised by John Sterling, and republished by F. D. Maurice. Law’sCase of Reason(1732), in answer to Tindal’sChristianity as old as the Creationis to a great extent an anticipation of Bishop Butler’s famous argument in theAnalogy. In this work Law shows himself at least the equal of the ablest champion of Deism. HisLetters to a Lady inclined to enter the Church of Romeare excellent specimens of the attitude of a high Anglican towards Romanism. His controversial writings have not received due recognition, partly because they were opposed to the drift of his times, partly because of his success in other fields.
2.Practical Divinity.—TheSerious Call to a Devout and Holy Life(1728), together with its predecessor,A Treatise of Christian Perfection(1726), deeply influenced the chief actors in the great Evangelical revival. The Wesleys, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, Thomas Scott and Thomas Adam all express their deep obligation to the author. TheSerious Callaffected others quite as deeply. Samuel Johnson, Gibbon, Lord Lyttelton and Bishop Horne all spoke enthusiastically of its merits; and it is still the only work by which its author is popularly known. It has high merits of style, being lucid and pointed to a degree. In a tract entitledThe Absolute Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments(1726) Law was tempted by the corruptions of the stage of the period to use unreasonable language, and incurred some effective criticism from John Dennis inThe Stage Defended.
3.Mysticism.—Though the least popular, by far the most interesting, original and suggestive of all Law’s works are those which he wrote in his later years, after he had become an enthusiastic admirer (not a disciple) of Jacob Boehme, the Teutonic theosophist. From his earliest years he had been deeply impressed with the piety, beauty and thoughtfulness of the writings of the Christian mystics, but it was not till after his accidental meeting with the works of Boehme, about 1734, that pronounced mysticism appeared in his works. Law’s mystic tendencies divorced him from the practical-minded Wesley, but in spite of occasional wild fancies the books are worth reading. They areA Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors of a late Book called a “Plain Account, &c., of the Lord’s Supper” (1737);The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Regeneration(1739);An Appeal to all that Doubt and Disbelieve the Truths of Revelation(1740);An Earnest and Serious Answer to Dr Trapp’s Sermon on being Righteous Overmuch(1740);The Spirit of Prayer(1749, 1752);The Way to Divine Knowledge(1752);The Spirit of Love(1752, 1754);A Short but Sufficient Confutation of Dr Warburton’s Projected Defence(as he calls it)of Christianity in his “Divine Legation of Moses”(1757);A Series of Letters(1760); aDialogue between a Methodist and a Churchman(1760); andAn Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy(1761).
Richard Tighe wrote a short account of Law’s life in 1813. See also Christopher Walton,Notes and Materials for a Complete Biography of W. Law(1848); Sir Leslie Stephen,English Thought in the 18th century, and in theDict. Nat. Biog.(xxxii. 236); W. H. Lecky,History of England in the 18th Century; C. J. Abbey,The English Church in the 18th Century; and J. H. Overton,William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic(1881).