Innovation in Higher Ed, 1680 Edition

Does anybody read Bagehot's Lombard Street any more? You totally should, it's full of good stuff. It's baffling to me, as a sometime teacher of History of Economic Thought, that most of the textbooks and anthologies don't mention him at all. Anyway, here he's quoting Macaulay:

During the interval between the Restoration and the  Revolution the riches of the nation had been rapidly increasing. Thousands of busy men found every Christmas that, after the expenses of  the year's housekeeping had been defrayed out of the year's income, a surplus remained ; and how that surplus was to be employed was a question of some difficulty. In … the seventeenth century, a lawyer, a physician, a retired merchant, who had saved some thousands, and who wished to place them safely and profitably, was often greatly embarrassed. … Many, too, wished to put their money where they could find it at an hour's notice, and looked about for some species of property which could be more readily transferred than a house or a field. A capitalist might lend … on personal security : but, if he did so, he ran a great risk of losing interest and principal. There were a few joint-stock companies, among which the East India Company held the foremost place : but the demand for the stock of such companies was far greater than the supply. … So great was that difficulty that the practice of hoarding was common. We are told that the father  of Pope, the poet, who retired from business in the City about the time of the Revolution, carried to a retreat in the country a strong-box containing near twenty thousand pounds, and took out from time to time what was required for household expenses... 

The natural effect of this state of things was that a crowd of projectors, ingenious and absurd, honest and knavish, employed themselves in devising new schemes for the employment of redundant capital. It was about the year 1688 that the word stock-jobber was first heard London. In the short space of four years a crowd of companies, every one of which confidently held out to subscribers the hope of immense gains, sprang into existence… There was a Tapestry Company, which would soon furnish pretty hangings for all the parlors of the middle class and for all the bedchambers of the higher. There was a Copper Company, which proposed to explore the mines of England, and held out a hope that they would prove not less valuable than those of Potosi. There was a Diving Company, which undertook to bring up precious effects from shipwrecked vessels, and which announced that it had laid in a stock of wonderful machines resembling complete suits of armor. In front of the helmet was a huge glass eye like that of Polyphemus ; and out of the crest went a pipe through which the air was to be admitted. … There was a society which undertook the office of giving gentlemen a liberal education on low terms, and which assumed the sounding name of the Royal Academies Company. In a pompous advertisement it was announced that the directors of the Royal Academies Company had engaged the best masters in every branch of knowledge, and were about to issue twenty thousand tickets at twenty shillings each. There was to be a lottery : two thousand prizes were to be drawn; and the fortunate holders of the prizes were to be taught, at the charge of the Company, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, conic sections, trigonometry, heraldry, japanning, fortification, book-keeping, and the art of playing the theorbo.

Many of Macaulay's examples, which I've left out here, are familiar, thanks to Charles Mackay and more recent historians of financial folly. (Including everyone's favorite, the company that raised funds "for an Undertaking which in due time shall be revealed.") The line about Pope is also familiar, at least to reader of The General Theory: Keynes cites it as an illustration of the position of the wealth-holder in a world where the rentier had been successfully euthanized. But I, at least, had never realized that the diving suit was a product of the South Sea bubble. And I'd never heard of this spiritual ancestor of Chris Whittle and Michelle Rhee.

It would be interesting to learn more about the claims that were made for this company, and what happened to it. Alas, Google is no help. Although, "Royal Academies Company" turns out to be a weirdly popular phrase among the Markov-chain text generators that populate fake spam blogs. (Seriously, guys, this is poetry.) We can only hope that today's enterprises that promise to give gentlemen a liberal education on low terms  (or at least an education in japanning and/or ski area management) will vanish as ignominiously.