THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION 45 
Second several plans were proposed, examined, attacked and de- 
fended. 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. After the Revolu- 
tion the subject was discussed with an animation before unknown. 
For, under the influence of liberty, the breed of political projec- 
tors 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 conspicu- 
ous among the political montebanks, 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 ex- 
ceeding the heaps of quails and the daily shower of manna. There 
would be no taxes; and yet the Exchequer would be full to over- 
flowing. 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 yeo- 
manry than an invading army from France would have had the 
heart to do. ; 
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, beside 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 thous- 
and pounds in paper money. Both Briscoe and Chamberlayne 
treated with the greatest contempt the notion that there could 
be an over-issue of paper as long as there was, for every ten pound 
note, a piece of land in the country worth ten pounds. Nobody, 
