And was not a square mile of rich land in Taunton Dean at least as well entitled to be called wealth as a bag of gold or silver?  The projectors could not deny that many people had a prejudice in favour of the precious metals, and that therefore, if the Land Bank were bound to cash its notes, it would very soon stop payment.  This difficulty they got over by proposing that the notes should be inconvertible, and that every body should be forced to take them.

The speculations of Chamberlayne on the subject of the currency may possibly find admirers even in our own time.  But to his other errors he added an error which began and ended with him.  He was fool enough to take it for granted, in all his reasonings, that the value of an estate varied directly as the duration.  He maintained that if the annual income derived from a manor were a thousand pounds, a grant of that manor for twenty years must be worth twenty thousand pounds, and a grant for a hundred years worth a hundred thousand pounds.  If, therefore, the lord of such a manor would pledge it for a hundred years to the Land Bank, the Land Bank might, on that security, instantly issue notes for a hundred thousand pounds.  On this subject Chamberlayne was proof to ridicule, to argument, even to arithmetical demonstration.  He was reminded that the fee simple of land would not sell for more than twenty years’ purchase.  To say, therefore, that a term of a hundred years was worth five times as much as a term of twenty years, was to say that a term of a hundred years was worth five times the fee simple; in other words, that a hundred was five times infinity.  Those who reasoned thus were refuted by being told that they were usurers; and it should seem that a large number of country gentlemen thought the refutation complete.519

In December 1693 Chamberlayne laid his plan, in all its naked absurdity, before the Commons, and petitioned to be heard.  He confidently undertook to raise eight thousand pounds on every freehold estate of a hundred and fifty pounds a year which should be brought, as he expressed it, into his Land Bank, and this without dispossessing the freeholder.520 All the squires in the House must have known that the fee simple of such an estate would hardly fetch three thousand pounds in the market.  That less than the fee simple of such an estate could, by any device, be made to produce eight thousand pounds, would, it might have been thought, have seemed incredible to the most illiterate foxhunter that could be found on the benches.  Distress, however, and animosity had made the landed gentlemen credulous.  They insisted on referring Chamberlayne’s plan to a committee; and the committee reported that the plan was practicable, and would tend to the benefit of the nation.521 But by this time the united force of demonstration and derision had begun to produce an effect even on the most ignorant rustics in the House.  The report lay unnoticed on the table; and the country was saved from a calamity compared with which the defeat of Landen and the loss of the Smyrna fleet would have been blessings.