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 Chambe