"The degrading lust of gain"

I liked this, from a nineteenth-century account of the South Sea bubble, cited by Nick Laird in the Graun last Saturday:

"Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as culpable as the South Sea Company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people - the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors. These things were never mentioned. The people were a simple, honest, hard-working people, ruined by a gang of robbers."

Read the rest (of the article, not the book).