years old; but its solvency had stood severe tests.  Even in the terrible crisis of 1672, when the whole Delta of the Rhine was overrun by the French armies, when the white flags were seen from the top of the Stadthouse, there was one place where, amidst the general consternation and confusion, tranquillity and order were still to be found; and that place was the Bank.  Why should not the Bank of London be as great and as durable as the Banks of Genoa and of Amsterdam?  Before the end of the reign of Charles the Second several plans were proposed, examined, attacked and defended.  Some pamphleteers maintained that a national bank ought to be under the direction of the King.  Others thought that the management ought to be entrusted to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council of the capital.516 After the Revolution the subject was discussed with an animation before unknown.  For, under the influence of liberty, the breed of political projectors multiplied exceedingly.  A crowd of plans, some of which resemble the fancies of a child or the dreams of a man in a fever, were pressed on the government.  Preeminently conspicuous among the political mountebanks, whose busy faces were seen every day in the lobby of the House of Commons, were John Briscoe and Hugh Chamberlayne, two projectors worthy to have been members of that Academy which Gulliver found at Lagado.  These men affirmed that the one cure for every distemper of the State was a Land Bank.  A Land Bank would work for England miracles such as had never been wrought for Israel, miracles exceeding the heaps of quails and the daily shower of manna.  There would be no taxes; and yet the Exchequer would be full to overflowing.  There would be no poor rates; for there would be no poor.  The income of every landowner would be doubled.  The profits of every merchant would be increased.  In short, the island would, to use Briscoe’s words, be the paradise of the world.  The only losers would be the moneyed men, those worst enemies of the nation, who had done more injury to the gentry and yeomanry than an invading army from France would have had the heart to do.517

These blessed effects the Land Bank was to produce simply by issuing enormous quantities of notes on landed security.  The doctrine of the projectors was that every person who had real property ought to have, besides that property, paper money to the full value of that property.  Thus, if his estate was worth two thousand pounds, he ought to have his estate and two thousand pounds in paper money.518 Both Briscoe and Chamberlayne treated with the greatest contempt the notion that there could be an overissue of paper as long as there was, for every ten pound note, a piece of land in the country worth ten pounds.  Nobody, they said, would accuse a goldsmith of overissuing as long as his vaults contained guineas and crowns to the full value of all the notes which bore his signature.  Indeed no goldsmith had in his vaults guineas and crowns to the full value of all his paper.