This chapter compares the two cases. It speaks to both debates at once, and what it adds is that the question of cause, which divides the scholars, is preceded in the texts by a question of answerability, which the texts settle differently according to who is writing.
6.1Avarice in two registers
Both texts explain the trouble of prices by the same vice. The avarice without bounds of the preamble and the creeping avarice of Pope's lines are one fault. What differs is its social distribution. In 301 the authority that acts speaks, and it locates avarice in a few rich sellers, against whom it sets the provinces, the poor and the army. In Mackay's account of 1720 a writer outside the events speaks, and he locates the vice everywhere: in the directors, both Houses, the nobility and the crowd. The few and the many appear in both texts, and in both the few are enriched at the many's expense. But in 301 the authority names the few as its enemy; in 1720, as Mackay reports it, the opponents of the measure name the few as its beneficiaries, and the peers who passed the measure are, in his words, among those seized by the speculating frenzy.
The difference follows the position of the writer. The authority of 301, justifying its own act, places the fault outside itself, down to its silence about the coin; the narrator of 1841, writing a moral history long after, lets the blame reach the top of the state. The comparison does not show either text wrong about where the fault lay. It shows that the distribution of blame in a text is evidence about its author before it is evidence about the events.
6.2Does the measure follow from the blame?
In 301 it does, and closely. The kind of fault alleged, excess driven by greed, gives the form of the remedy, a ceiling rather than a fixed price; the theory that only fear restrains gives the penalty; and the measure's foreseeable points of failure, the willing buyer and the seller who withholds, are turned into new objects of blame. The measure names no end, and its argument presents its cost as falling on the guilty alone.
In 1720 it does not. The Act that let the company take over the debt was a fiscal bargain, sought by the company and accepted by Parliament against a rival offer; on Mackay's telling it was justified by advantage to the public finances, not by a culprit. Blame came from within Parliament, against the measure, and in the terms that the emperors had used for their own measure's targets. The South Sea case thus shows blame as opposition rather than as justification, and the term it records, interest secured until Midsummer 1727, belongs to the bargain, not to any emergency.
6.3Where the cases bear on the debates
On the edict, the setting that Kent and Corcoran give it, a time of debasement and a monetary reform (Kent 1920; Corcoran 1996), places beside it a cause that the preamble omits. The present reading does not dispute that setting; it cannot test it. It adds that the preamble's argument depends on the omission. The case it makes, that every high price is avarice, could not be made if the coin were in question, since a fall in the coin's value would raise prices without any seller's fault.
On 1720, the argument between mania and fundamentals is in part an argument about which text one reads. Blame lives in the period narrative; mechanism lives in the modern accounts, Dale's scheme of public finance (Dale 2004), Neal's surviving system (Neal 1990) and Skeptron's sequence of authority, rise and collapse. Mackay's own chapter holds both: a story of debt, interest and expected trade, and a story of vice. This study reads Minsky's instability without villains (Minsky 1986) as the far end of the move from the first kind of text to the second.
6.4What the modern records keep and lose
The two records make opposite choices. The record of 301 keeps the blame, compresses it to "merchants", and marks it as a claim, not a finding; it drops the victims, the shape of the remedy and the penalty. The record of 1720 drops the blame altogether and keeps a mechanism. Each choice is defensible as caution. Each costs a later reader the same thing: the ability to see, from the record, how the authority's account of who was at fault was connected to who was made to pay. The texts keep apart who is blamed, who suffered and who pays for the measure; the records keep at most one of the three.