rlayne'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.

All the projectors of this busy time, however, were not so absurd as
Chamberlayne. One among them, William Paterson, was an ingenious, though
not always a judicious, speculator. Of his early life little is known
except that he was a native of Scotland, and that he had been in the
West Indies. In what character he had visited the West Indies was a
matter about which his contemporaries differed. His friends said that
he had been a missionary; his enemies that he had been a buccaneer. He
seems to have been gifted by nature with fertile invention, an ardent
temperament and great powers of persuasion, and to have acquired
somewhere in the course of his vagrant life a perfect knowledge of
accounts.

This man submitted to the government, in 1691, a plan of a national
bank; and his plan was favourably received both by statesmen and by
merchants. But years passed away; and nothing was done, till, in the
spring of 1694, it became absolutely necessary to find some new mode of
defraying the charges of the war. Then at length the scheme devised
by the poor and obscure Scottish adventurer was taken up in earnest by
Montague. With Montague was closely allied Michael Godfrey, the brother
of that Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey whose sad and mysterious death had,
fifteen years before, produced a terrible outbreak of popular feeling.
Michael was one of the ablest, most upright and most opulent of the
merchant princes of London. He was, as might have been expected from his
near connection with the martyr of the Protestant faith, a zealous
Whig. Some of his writings are still extant, and prove him to have had a
strong and clear mind.

By these two distinguished men Paterson's scheme was fathered. Montague
undertook to manage the House of Commons, Godfrey to manage the City. An
approving vote was obtained from the Committee of Ways and Means; and a
bill, the title of which gave occasion to many sarcasms, was laid on the
table. It was indeed not easy to guess that a bill, which purported
o