Exceptional, however, was the notice this latter circumstance was eventually accorded. Charles Mackay, in a singularly acute account of the South Sea Bubble, pointed out the truth: [In the autumn of 1720,] public meetings were held in every considerable town of the empire, at which petitions were adopted, praying the vengeance of the legislature upon the South-Sea directors, who, by their fraudulent practices, had brought the nation to the brink of ruin. Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as culpable as the South-Sea company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the
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