A correspondent writes to tell me of sums so vast committed to engines of calculation and reasoning that I confess the figures exceed any I encountered examining the accounts of the East India Company or the canal subscriptions of my own day. Whether such an engine can truly reckon or merely mimics reckoning, I cannot say, for it lies beyond anything shown to me. But the pattern of men rushing capital toward a wonder they only half understand—that I have seen before, and on that I may venture an opinion.

It is the nature of new and profitable-seeming projects to attract capital far in excess of what sober calculation would justify, because no man wishes to be the one left standing outside the door when fortune is being distributed within. I watched this with the canal mania, and heard tell from my elders of the South Sea affair, in which respectable men persuaded themselves that a company trading chiefly in expectation must surely turn expectation into gold. The projectors were not fools, merely men subject to the same passions as other men, dressed in the clothing of calculation. Sympathy, that faculty by which we imagine ourselves into another's situation, works oddly in matters of speculation: each investor imagines himself into the situation of the successful investor he has heard of, and none imagines himself into the situation of the ruined one, until ruin arrives and teaches the l