It came out by and by that the musical banks paid little or no dividend,
but divided their profits by way of bonus on the original shares once in
every three hundred and fifty years; and as it was now only two hundred
years since there had been one of these distributions, people felt that
they could not hope for another in their own time and preferred
investments whereby they got some more tangible return; all which, she
said, was very melancholy to think of.
Having made these last admissions, she returned to her original
statement, namely, that every one in the country really supported the
bank. As to the fewness of the people, and the absence of the
able-bodied, she pointed out to me with some justice that this was
exactly what we ought to expect. The men who were most conversant about
the stability of human institutions, such as the lawyers, men of science,
doctors, statesmen, painters, and the like, were just those who were most
likely to be misled by their own fancied accomplishments, and to be made
unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return,
which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition, by their vanity,
which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the
vulgar, and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly
upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies,
which were generally diseased; let a person's intellect be never so
sound, unless his body were in absolute health, he could form no judgment
worth having on matters of this kind.
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