Vox Meditantis

What is the best excuse you have heard lately?

Monday, the 17th of July, 1721

I address you directly, whoever you may be that reads or hears these words, for I have neither the patience this evening for circumlocution, nor the energy to sustain the polite fiction that I write for myself alone. I write because I must. The thoughts press upon me, and the quill is the only instrument I possess for their relief. The surgeon bleeds his patient; I bleed ink.

I am a clerk. This, I trust, requires no elaborate apology. I sit at a desk, in a room that smells of tallow and damp paper, and I translate the affairs of men into columns of figures. I have done so for going on fifteen years. I am not, I think, a foolish man. I am not, I flatter myself, an unjust one. I have kept my accounts scrupulously. I have committed no fraud of which I am aware. I have not speculated upon the price of stock, nor thrown my modest savings into the bottomless maw of any Bubble, and I am still here, which is more than can be said for a great many men who considered themselves, twelve months since, to be considerably wiser than I.

But I digress before I have even begun, which is itself a symptom of the condition I am writing to describe. The occasion for this evening’s entry is a question, one that has lain upon my chest all the afternoon like a flat stone upon a grave.

This morning, in the interval between the arrival of the first petitions and the commencement of my proper duties, one of my junior colleagues (a bright-eyed young man, new enough to his post to retain some unfortunate remnant of levity) turned to me from his stool and enquired, with perfect cheerfulness: “What is the best excuse you have heard lately?”

He meant it as pleasantry. He wished to divert himself. It is the sort of question that belongs to the coffee house, not to the office of a clerk, but he is young, and I have learnt not to invest too much expectation in the young.

The best excuse.

Good God.

Where does one begin?

This morning alone, I had received, before the clock struck nine, three petitions from former subscribers to the South Sea Company (God preserve the memory of that magnificent, catastrophic engine of ruin, for the ruin itself shall require no preservation; it is stamped upon the faces of half the City), and each was written in the cramped, agitated hand of a man dictating through barely-suppressed panic.

The first gentleman, a mercer by trade, explained that he had invested his wife’s dowry and the better part of his shop’s proceeds upon the advice of a cousin, who had it upon the authority of a friend, who had heard from a broker at Jonathan’s Coffee House that the stock was certain to double before Michaelmas. The ruin that followed was, by his account, the cousin’s fault entirely. The cousin, I have no doubt, blames the friend. The friend blames the broker. The broker blames the market. The market, as ever, accepts no blame at all, for the market has no face, no conscience, and no address to which one may direct a writ.

The second petition came from a widow’s son, who had managed his mother’s estate and committed some seven hundred pounds to stock at the very height of the frenzy, when shares stood at near a thousand pounds apiece. He explained, with considerable eloquence, that he had been deceived by the prevailing enthusiasm of the age; that all men of credit and standing had appeared to consider the venture sound; and that therefore he could hardly be held accountable for his judgment, since his judgment had been no worse than anyone else’s. This is, I confess, the excuse I find most instructive, because it is at once the most commonplace and the most revealing. It is the excuse of the crowd. When all men are fools together, why should any single fool bear the consequences? The logic has a kind of terrible symmetry. I do not accept it. But I understand it exceedingly well.

The third petition was, in its way, the masterpiece. A gentleman (and here I use the word in its most generous possible application) had borrowed considerably against the expectation of profit from his South Sea shares and now found himself besieged by creditors on every side. His excuse for the ruinous borrowing was as follows: he had received, he said, a private assurance from a director of the Company that the stock would rise to fifteen hundred pounds per share. He had this assurance verbally, in a coffee house, from a man whose name he could not now recall with any certainty, at a table he could not identify, in the company of persons he could no longer name. He committed nothing to paper. He retained no receipt. He sought no legal instrument to confirm the promise. And yet he borrowed seven thousand pounds upon the strength of it.

When I recounted this last to my young colleague, he laughed. He pronounced it the most impudent thing he had ever heard.

I did not laugh. The faculty of laughter, as it pertains to the ruin of men’s fortunes, deserted me some years since.

I have heard men explain that they were deceived; that they were misled; that their advisors were incompetent; that the law was insufficiently clear; that the season was unfavourable; that their father had pursued the same course and prospered, and that it was therefore only ill-fortune that distinguished their case from his. I have heard men blame their wives for urging the investment upon them, and I have heard other men, in this same office, within this same week, blame their wives for having opposed the venture, on the grounds that the opposition made them stubborn and reckless in their resolve. I have heard men of considerable education, men who could construe Cicero and cite Scripture with easy familiarity, explain with perfect earnestness why the loss of their fortune was not their fault.

And here is the melancholy truth to which fifteen years at this desk have brought me: they all believe it. That is what my young colleague does not yet understand. He laughed because he imagined the petitioner knew himself to be making excuses, and therefore the excuse contained some wink of self-awareness, some private comedy lurking within its impudence. But the man who borrowed seven thousand pounds upon a nameless whisper in an unidentifiable coffee house does not, in the depth of his heart, consider himself a fool. He considers himself a victim. The distinction is not trivial. A man who knows himself a fool may, in time, reform. A man who considers himself a victim need learn nothing, for there is nothing in him that wants correction. The fault lies always elsewhere. The world is full of such men, and the ledgers of this office are full of the record of their passage through it.

It is written that the love of money is the root of all evil. I would only observe, from fifteen years of testimony, that the love of money appears also to be the root of a most prodigious self-deception; and that men who would not tell a direct lie upon any other subject in the world will tell themselves extraordinary falsehoods upon the subject of their own prudence.

I have been prudent. I say this not in boast, for prudence is a cold and unshowy virtue, and it earns little admiration in an age that esteems boldness and gain above all things. I have lived within my income. I have not speculated. When the mania for South Sea stock was at its height, and the coffee houses rang with the names of new schemes and new companies of impossible promise, and men of my acquaintance pressed me to invest, I declined. Not because I am wiser than other men. Not because I possess some especial gift of foresight that others lack. I declined because I do not trust other men with my money, and I do not trust myself to be cleverer than the market, and I do not trust any scheme that promises returns so manifestly in excess of what honest labour can produce. This is not wisdom. It is merely suspicion raised to the dignity of a principle. And yet it has served me better than the wisdom of a great many men who congratulated themselves, twelve months ago, upon their penetration and their boldness.

And yet, I confess, there are hours when I wonder whether prudence is in truth a virtue, or merely the last shelter of a man too acquainted with the ways of the world to permit himself any hope.

There are men who gambled and won. I know several of them. They sold their South Sea shares at eight or nine hundred pounds apiece, before the collapse, either by genuine foresight or by the merest good fortune, and they are now men of considerable wealth, keeping carriages that pass my window with a sound like distant thunder. Were they prudent? Were they wise? Or were they simply fortunate in the moment at which their appetite chanced to be satisfied, so that they happened to sell before the greater fools arrived to purchase at the summit?

I do not know. And this not-knowing is, I find, the heaviest charge of the cynical disposition, for which disposition I make no apology, though the philosophers counsel against it. They say, and I receive the counsel with due solemnity, that to distrust all men is a form of pride in reverse; that the man who credits no one with integrity elevates himself above his fellows; and that this elevation is its own vanity. Very well. I receive the reproof. And then I open the next petition.

The best excuse I have heard lately.

I gave my young colleague an answer, in the end: the third petition, the man who borrowed seven thousand pounds upon a whispered promise from a nameless director in an unnameable coffee house. He laughed again and returned to his work, satisfied.

But walking home this evening, through the narrow lanes behind the Exchange, past the booksellers and the print-shops and the men selling last week’s newspapers as though the news had not already turned to ash in the mouths of those who had trusted it, I revised my answer. The best excuse, I now think, is not any one of them. The best excuse is the one that underlies all of them: the great, unwritten, universal excuse of this or any age.

I wanted the money. I was certain I should have it. And because I wanted it, and was certain of it, I persuaded myself that wanting and certainty together constituted a reason.

No one writes this in a petition. It appears on no paper that crosses my desk. But it is the true document. All the rest is merely the engrossment.

I shall close the inkwell now. The candle burns very low. Tomorrow there will be more petitions.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.