An Essay Upon Projects

by Daniel Defoe

little, in forcing the reader to repeat some of the worst of our

  vulgar imprecations, in reading my thoughts against it; to which,

  however, I have this to reply:

  First, I did not find it easy to express what I mean without putting

  down the very words--at least, not so as to be very intelligible.

  Secondly, why should words repeated only to expose the vice, taint

  the reader more than a sermon preached against lewdness should the

  assembly?--for of necessity it leads the hearer to the thoughts of

  the fact. But the morality of every action lies in the end; and if

  the reader by ill-use renders himself guilty of the fact in reading,

  which I designed to expose by writing, the fault is his, not mine.

  I have endeavoured everywhere in this book to be as concise as

  possible, except where calculations obliged me to be particular; and

  having avoided impertinence in the book, I would avoid it too, in

  the preface, and therefore shall break off with subscribing myself,

  Sir,

  Your most obliged, humble servant

  D. F.

  AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION.

  Necessity, which is allowed to be the mother of invention, has so

  violently agitated the wits of men at this time that it seems not at

  all improper, by way of distinction, to call it the Projecting Age.

  For though in times of war and public confusions the like humour of

  invention has seemed to stir, yet, without being partial to the

  present, it is, I think, no injury to say the past ages have never

  come up to the degree of projecting and inventing, as it refers to

  matters of negotiation and methods of civil polity, which we see

  this age arrived to.

  Nor is it a hard matter to assign probable causes of the perfection

  in this modern art. I am not of their melancholy opinion who

  ascribe it to the general poverty of the nation, since I believe it

  is easy to prove the nation itself, taking it as one general stock,

  is not at all diminished or impoverished by this long, this

  chargeable war, but, on the contrary, was never richer since it was

  inhabited.

  Nor am I absolutely of the opinion that we are so happy as to be

  wiser in this age than our forefathers; though at the same time I

  must own some parts of knowledge in science as well as art have

  received improvements in this age altogether concealed from the

  former.

  The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human

  knowledge, is a sufficient proof of what I say, especially in

  conducting armies and in offensive engines. Witness the now ways of

  rallies, fougades, entrenchments, attacks, lodgments, and a long et

  cetera of new inventions which want names, practised in sieges and

  encampments; witness the new forts of bombs and unheard-of mortars,

  of seven to ten ton weight, with which our fleets, standing two or

  three miles off at sea, can imitate God Almighty Himself and rain

  fire and brimstone out of heaven, as it were, upon towns built on

  the firm land; witness also our new-invented child of hell, the

  machine which carries thunder, lightning, and earthquakes in its

  bowels, and tears up the most impregnable fortification.

  But if I would search for a cause from whence it comes to pass that

  this age swarms with such a multitude of projectors more than usual,

  who--besides the innumerable conceptions, which die in the bringing

  forth, and (like abortions of the brain) only come into the air and

  dissolve--do really every day produce new contrivances, engines, and

  projects to get money, never before thought of; if, I say, I would

  examine whence this comes to pass, it must be thus:

  The losses and depredations which this war brought with it at first

  were exceeding many, suffered chiefly by the ill-conduct of

  merchants themselves, who did not apprehend the danger to be really

  what it was: for before our Admiralty could possibly settle

  convoys, cruisers, and stations for men-of-war all over the world,

  the French covered the sea with their privateers and took an

  incredible number of our ships. I have heard the loss computed, by

  those who pretended they were able to guess, at above fifteen

  millions of pounds sterling, in ships and goods, in the first two or

  three years of the war--a sum which, if put into French, would make

  such a rumbling sound of great numbers as would fright a weak

  accountant out of his belief, being no less than one hundred and

  ninety millions of livres. The weight of this loss fell chiefly on

  the trading part of the nation, and, amongst them, on the merchants;

  and amongst them, again, upon the most refined capacities, as the

  insurers, &c. And an incredible number of the best merchants in the

  kingdom sunk under the load, as may appear a little by a Bill which

  once passed the House of Commons for the relief of merchant-

  insurers, who had suffered by the war with France. If a great many

  fell, much greater were the number of those who felt a sensible ebb

  of their fortunes, and with difficulty bore up under the loss of

  great part of their estates. These, prompted by necessity, rack

  their wits for new contrivances, new inventions, new trades, stocks,

  projects, and anything to retrieve the desperate credit of their

  fortunes. That this is probable to be the cause will appear further

  thus. France (though I do not believe all the great outcries we

  make of their misery and distress--if one-half of which be true,

  they are certainly the best subjects in the world) yet without

  question has felt its share of the losses and damages of the war;

  but the poverty there falling chiefly on the poorer sort of people,

  they have not been so fruitful in inventions and practices of this

  nature, their genius being quite of another strain. As for the

  gentry and more capable sort, the first thing a Frenchman flies to

  in his distress is the army; and he seldom comes back from thence to

  get an estate by painful industry, but either has his brains knocked

  out or makes his fortune there.

  If industry be in any business rewarded with success it is in the

  merchandising part of the world, who indeed may more truly be said

  to live by their wits than any people whatsoever. All foreign

  negotiation, though to some it is a plain road by the help of

  custom, yet is in its beginning all project, contrivance, and

  invention. Every new voyage the merchant contrives is a project;

  and ships are sent from port to port, as markets and merchandises

  differ, by the help of strange and universal intelligence--wherein

  some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a merchant

  sitting at home in his counting-house at once converses with all

  parts of the known world. This and travel make a true-bred merchant

  the most intelligent man in the world, and consequently the most

  capable, when urged by necessity, to contrive new ways to live. And

  from hence, I humbly conceive, may very properly be derived the

  projects, so much the subject of the present discourse. And to this

  sort of men it is easy to trace the original of banks, stocks,

>   stock-jobbing, assurances, friendly societies, lotteries, and the

  like.

  To this may be added the long annual inquiry in the House of Commons

  for ways and means, which has been a particular movement to set all

  the heads of the nation at work; and I appeal, with submission, to

  the gentlemen of that honourable House, if the greatest part of all

  the ways and means out of the common road of land taxes, polls, and

  the like, have not been handed to them from the merchant, and in a

  great measure paid by them too.

  However, I offer this but as an essay at the original of this

  prevailing humour of the people; and as it is probable, so it is

  also possible to be otherwise, which I submit to future

  demonstration.

  Of the several ways this faculty of projecting have exerted itself,

  and of the various methods, as the genius of the authors has

  inclined, I have been a diligent observer and, in most, an

  unconcerned spectator, and perhaps have some advantage from thence

  more easily to discover the faux pas of the actors. If I have given

  an essay towards anything new, or made discovery to advantage of any

  contrivance now on foot, all men are at the liberty to make use of

  the improvement; if any fraud is discovered, as now practised, it is

  without any particular reflection upon parties or persons.

  Projects of the nature I treat about are doubtless in general of

  public advantage, as they tend to improvement of trade, and

  employment of the poor, and the circulation and increase of the

  public stock of the kingdom; but this is supposed of such as are

  built on the honest basis of ingenuity and improvement, in which,

  though I will allow the author to aim primarily at his own

  advantage, yet with the circumstances of public benefit added.

  Wherefore it is necessary to distinguish among the projects of the

  present times between the honest and the dishonest.

  There are, and that too many, fair pretences of fine discoveries,

  new inventions, engines, and I know not what, which--being advanced

  in notion, and talked up to great things to be performed when such

  and such sums of money shall be advanced, and such and such engines

  are made--have raised the fancies of credulous people to such a

  height that, merely on the shadow of expectation, they have formed

  companies, chose committees, appointed officers, shares, and books,

  raised great stocks, and cried up an empty notion to that degree

  that people have been betrayed to part with their money for shares

  in a new nothing; and when the inventors have carried on the jest

  till they have sold all their own interest, they leave the cloud to

  vanish of itself, and the poor purchasers to quarrel with one

  another, and go to law about settlements, transferrings, and some

  bone or other thrown among them by the subtlety of the author to lay

  the blame of the miscarriage upon themselves. Thus the shares at

  first begin to fall by degrees, and happy is he that sells in time;

  till, like brass money, it will go at last for nothing at all. So

  have I seen shares in joint-stocks, patents, engines, and

  undertakings, blown up by the air of great words, and the name of

  some man of credit concerned, to 100 pounds for a five-hundredth

  part or share (some more), and at last dwindle away till it has been

  stock-jobbed down to 10 pounds, 12 pounds, 9 pounds, 8 pounds a

  share, and at last no buyer (that is, in short, the fine new word

  for nothing-worth), and many families ruined by the purchase. If I

  should name linen manufactures, saltpetre-works, copper mines,

  diving engines, dipping, and the like, for instances of this, I

  should, I believe, do no wrong to truth, or to some persons too

  visibly guilty.

  I might go on upon this subject to expose the frauds and tricks of

  stock-jobbers, engineers, patentees, committees, with those Exchange

  mountebanks we very properly call brokers, but I have not gaul

  enough for such a work; but as a general rule of caution to those

  who would not be tricked out of their estates by such pretenders to

  new inventions, let them observe that all such people who may be

  suspected of design have assuredly this in their proposal: your

  money to the author must go before the experiment. And here I could

  give a very diverting history of a patent-monger whose cully was

  nobody but myself, but I refer it to another occasion.

  But this is no reason why invention upon honest foundations and to

  fair purposes should not be encouraged; no, nor why the author of

  any such fair contrivances should not reap the harvest of his own

  ingenuity. Our Acts of Parliament for granting patents to first

  inventors for fourteen years is a sufficient acknowledgment of the

  due regard which ought to be had to such as find out anything which

  may be of public advantage; new discoveries in trade, in arts and

  mysteries, of manufacturing goods, or improvement of land, are

  without question of as great benefit as any discoveries made in the

  works of nature by all the academies and royal societies in the

  world.

  There is, it is true, a great difference between new inventions and

  projects, between improvement of manufactures or lands (which tend

  to the immediate benefit of the public, and employing of the poor),

  and projects framed by subtle heads with a sort of a deceptio visus

  and legerdemain, to bring people to run needless and unusual

  hazards: I grant it, and give a due preference to the first. And

  yet success has so sanctified some of those other sorts of projects

  that it would be a kind of blasphemy against fortune to disallow

  them. Witness Sir William Phips's voyage to the wreck; it was a

  mere project; a lottery of a hundred thousand to one odds; a hazard

  which, if it had failed, everybody would have been ashamed to have

  owned themselves concerned in; a voyage that would have been as much

  ridiculed as Don Quixote's adventure upon the windmill. Bless us!

  that folks should go three thousand miles to angle in the open sea

  for pieces of eight! Why, they would have made ballads of it, and

  the merchants would have said of every unlikely adventure, "It, was

  like Phips's wreck-voyage." But it had success, and who reflects

  upon the project?

  "Nothing's so partial as the laws of fate,

  Erecting blockheads to suppress the great.

  Sir Francis Drake the Spanish plate-fleet won;

  He had been a pirate if he had got none.

  Sir Walter Raleigh strove, but missed the plate,

  And therefore died a traitor to the State.

  Endeavour bears a value more or less,

  Just as 'tis recommended by success:

  The lucky coxcomb ev'ry man will prize,

  And prosp'rous actions always pass for wise."

  However, this sort of projects comes under no reflection as to their

  honesty, save that there is a kind of honesty a man owes to himself

  and to his family that prohibits him throwing away his estate in

  impracticable, improbable adventures; but still some hit, even of

  the most unlikely, of which this was one o
f Sir William Phips, who

  brought home a cargo of silver of near 200,000 pounds sterling, in

  pieces of eight, fished up out of the open sea, remote from any

  shore, from an old Spanish ship which had been sunk above forty

  years.

  THE HISTORY OF PROJECTS.

  When I speak of writing a History of Projects, I do not mean either

  of the introduction of, or continuing, necessary inventions, or the

  improvement of arts and sciences before known, but a short account

  of projects and projecting, as the word is allowed in the general

  acceptation at this present time; and I need not go far back for the

  original of the practice.

  Invention of arts, with engines and handicraft instruments for their

  improvement, requires a chronology as far back as the eldest son of

  Adam, and has to this day afforded some new discovery in every age.

  The building of the Ark by Noah, so far as you will allow it a human

  work, was the first project I read of; and, no question, seemed so

  ridiculous to the graver heads of that wise, though wicked, age that

  poor Noah was sufficiently bantered for it: and, had he not been

  set on work by a very peculiar direction from heaven, the good old

  man would certainly have been laughed out of it as a most senseless

  ridiculous project.

  The building of Babel was a right project; for indeed the true

  definition of a project, according to modern acceptation, is, as is

  said before, a vast undertaking, too big to be managed, and

  therefore likely enough to come to nothing. And yet, as great as

  they are, it is certainly true of them all, even as the projectors

  propose: that, according to the old tale, if so many eggs are

  hatched, there will be so many chickens, and those chickens may lay

  so many eggs more, and those eggs produce so many chickens more, and

  so on. Thus it was most certainly true that if the people of the

  Old World could have built a house up to heaven, they should never

  be drowned again on earth, and they only had forgot to measure the

  height; that is, as in other projects, it only miscarried, or else

  it would have succeeded.

  And yet, when all is done, that very building, and the incredible

  height it was carried, is a demonstration of the vast knowledge of

  that infant age of the world, who had no advantage of the

  experiments or invention of any before themselves.

  "Thus when our fathers, touched with guilt,

  That huge stupendous staircase built;

  We mock, indeed, the fruitless enterprise

  (For fruitless actions seldom pass for wise),

  But were the mighty ruins left, they'd show

  To what degree that untaught age did know."

  I believe a very diverting account might be given of this, but I

  shall not attempt it. Some are apt to say with Solomon, "No new

  thing happens under the sun; but what is, has been:" yet I make no

  question but some considerable discovery has been made in these

  latter ages, and inventions of human origin produced, which the

  world was ever without before, either in whole or in part; and I

  refer only to two cardinal points, the use of the loadstone at sea,

  and the use of gunpowder and guns: both which, as to the inventing

  part, I believe the world owes as absolutely to those particular

  ages as it does the working in brass and iron to Tubal Cain, or the

  inventing of music to Jubal, his brother. As to engines and

  instruments for handicraftsmen, this age, I daresay, can show such

  as never were so much as thought of, much less imitated before; for

  I do not call that a real invention which has something before done

  like it--I account that more properly an improvement. For

  handicraft instruments, I know none owes more to true genuine

  contrivance, without borrowing from any former use, than a mechanic

  engine contrived in our time called a knitting-frame, which, built

  with admirable symmetry, works really with a very happy success, and

  may be observed by the curious to have a more than ordinary