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Mississippi company.
By its connection with the
bank of Law, its first attempts at colonization were conducted with careless prodigality.
The richest prai-
ries, the most inviting fields, in the southern valley of the Mississippi, were conceded to companies or to individuals who sought principalities in the New World.
Thus it was hoped that at least six thousand white colonists would be established in
Louisiana.
To Law himself there was conceded on the
Arkansas one of
those vast prairies, of which the wide-spreading waves of verdure are bounded only by the azure of the sky. There he designed to plant a city and villages; his investments rapidly amounted to a million and a half of livres; through the company, which he directed, possessing a monopoly of the slave-trade for the
French colonies, he had purchased three hundred negroes, mechanics from
France, and a throng of German emigrants, were engaged in his service or as his tenants, his commissioners lavished gifts on the tribes with whom they smoked the calumet.
But when, in 1727, a Jesuit priest arrived there, he found only thirty needy Frenchmen, who had been abandoned by their employer, and had no consolation but in the blandness of the climate and the unrivalled fertility of the soil.
The decline of
Louisiana was a consequence of financial changes in
France.
In January of 1719, the bank of Law became, by a
negotiation with the regent, the Bank of France; and a government which had almost absolute power of legislation conspired to give the widest extension to what was called credit.
‘Law might have regulated at his pleasure the interest of money, the value of stocks, the price of labor and of produce.’
The con-
test between paper and specie began to rage,—the
