46 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 
they said, would accuse a goldsmith of over-issuing 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 prejudice 
in favor of the precious metals, and that therefore, if the Land 
Bank were bound to cash its notes, it would very soon stop pay- 
ment. This difficulty they got over by proposing that the. notes 
should be inconvertible, and that everybody should be forced to 
take them. 
The speculations of Chamberlayne on the subject of the cur- 
reney 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 reason- 
ings, 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 hun- 
dred years worth a hundred thousand pounds. If, therefore, the 
lord of such manor would pledge it for a hundred years to the 
Land Bank, the Land Bank might, on that security, instantly is- 
sue notes for a hundred thousand pounds. On this subject 
Chamberlayne was proof to ridicule, to argument, even to arith- 
metical 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 reason- 
ed 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. 
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 
