The Humbugs of the World by P. T. Barnum (best contemporary novels .TXT) 📕

ready-minded, acute, graceful and witty scholars that ever lived, was a Dutchman. All Holland and Flanders, in days when they were richer, and stronger compared with the rest of the world than they are now, were full of singing societies and musical societies and poetry making societies. The universities of Leyden and Utrecht and Louvain are of highly an ancient European fame. And as for flowers, and bulbs in particular, Holland is a principal home and market of them now, more than two hundred years after the time I am going to tell of.

Tulips grow wild in Southern Russia, the Crimea and Asia Minor, as potatoes do in Peru. The first tulip in Christian Europe was raised in Augsburg, in the garden of a flower-loving lawyer, one Counsellor Herwart, in the year 1559, thirteen years after Luther died. This tulip bulb was sent to Herwart from Constantinople. For about eighty years after this the flower continually increased in repute and became more and more known and cultivated, until the fantastic eagerness of the demand for fine ones and the great prices that they brought, resulted in a real mania like that about the morus multicaulis, or the petroleum mania of today, but much more intense. It began in the year 1635, and went out with an explosion in the year 1837.

This tulip business is, I believe, the only speculative excitement in history whose subject-matter did not even claim to have any real value. Petroleum is worth some shillings a gallon for actual use for many purposes. Stocks always claim to represent some real trade or business. The morus multicaulis was to be as permanent a source of wealth as corn, and was expected to produce the well known mercantile substance of silk. But nobody ever pretended that tulips could be eaten, or manufactured, or consumed in any way of practical usefulness. They have not one single quality of the kind termed useful. They have nothing desirable except the beauty of a peculiarly short-lived blossom. You can do absolutely nothing with them except to look at them. A speculation in them is exactly as reasonable as one in butterflies would be.

In the course of about one year, 1634⁠–⁠5, the tulip frenzy, after having increased for fifteen or twenty years with considerable speed, came to a climax, and poisoned the whole Dutch nation. Prices had at the end of this short period risen from high to extravagant, and from extravagant to insane. High and low, counts, burgomasters, merchants, shopkeepers, servants, shoeblacks, all were buying and selling tulips like mad. In order to make the commodity of the day accessible to all, a new weight was invented, called a perit, so small that there were about eight thousand of them in one pound avoirdupois, and a single tulip root weighing from half an ounce to an ounce, would contain from 200 to 400 of these perits. Thus, anybody unable to buy a whole tulip, could buy a perit or two, and have what the lawyers call an “undivided interest” in a root. This way of owning shows how utterly unreal was the pretended value. For imagine a small owner attempting to take his own perits and put them in his pocket. He would make a little hole in the tulip-root, would probably kill it, and would certainly obtain a little bit of utterly worthless pulp for himself, and no value at all. There was a whole code of business regulations made to meet the peculiar needs of the tulip business, besides, and in every town were to be found “tulip-notaries,” to conduct the legal part of the business, take acknowledgments of deeds, note protests, etc.

To say that the tulips were worth their weight in gold would be a very small story. It would not be a very great exaggeration to say that they were worth their size in diamonds. The most valuable species of all was named Semper Augustus, and a bulb of it which weighed 200 perits, or less than half an ounce avoirdupois, was thought cheap at 5,500 florins. A florin may be called about 40 cents; so that the little brown root was worth $2,200, or 220 gold eagles, which would weigh, by a rough estimate, eight pounds four ounces, or 132 ounces avoirdupois. Thus this half ounce Semper Augustus was worth⁠—I mean he would bring⁠—two hundred and sixty-four times his weight in gold!

There were many cases where people invested whole fortunes equal to $40,000 or $50,000 in collections of forty or fifty tulip roots. Once there happened to be only two Semper Augustuses in all Holland, one in Haarlem and one in Amsterdam. The Haarlem one was sold for twelve acres of building lots, and the Amsterdam one for a sum equal to $1,840.00, together with a new carriage, span of grey horses and double harness, complete.

Here is the list of merchandise and estimated prices given for one root of the Viceroy tulip. It is interesting as showing what real merchandise was worth in those days by a cash standard, aside from its exhibition of tremendous speculative bedlamism:

160 bushels wheat $179.20 320 bushels rye 223.20 Four fat oxen 192.00 Eight fat hogs 96.00 Twelve fat sheep 48.00 Two hogsheads wine 28.00 Four tuns beer 12.80 Two tuns butter 76.80 1000 lbs. cheese 48.00 A bed all complete 40.00 One suit clothes 32.00 A silver drinking cup 24.00 Total exactly $1,000.00

In 1636, regular tulip exchanges were established in the nine Dutch towns where the largest tulip business was done, and while the gambling was at its intensest, the matter was managed exactly as stock gambling is managed in Wall Street today. You went out into “the street” without owning a tulip or a perit of a tulip in the world, and met another fellow with just as many tulips as yourself. You talk and “banter” with him, and finally (we will suppose) you “sell short” ten Semper Augustuses, “seller three,” for $2,000 each, in all $20,000. This means in ordinary English, that without having any tulips (i.e., short,) you promise to deliver the ten roots as above in three