he 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. 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