THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION 47 
freehold estate of a hundred and fifty pounds a year which should 
be brought, as he expressed it, into his Land Bank, and this with- 
out dispossessing the freeholder. 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 fox- 
hunter that could be found on the benches. Distress, however, 
and animosity had made the landed gentlemen ecredulous. They 
insisted on referring Chamberlayne’s plan to a committee; and 
the committee reported that the plan was practicable, and would 
tend to the benefit of the nation. But by this time the united 
force of demonstration and derision had begun to produce an 
effect even on the most ignorant rustices 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 Scot- 
land, and that he had been in the West Indies. In what charac- 
ter he had visited the West Indies was a matter about which his 
contemporaries differed. His friends said he had been a mission- 
ary ; his enemies that he had been a buccaneer. He seems to have 
been gifted by nature with fertile invention, an ardent tempera- 
ment and great powers of persuasion, and to have acquired some- 
where 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 favorably received both by states- 
men and 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 obseure Scottish 
adventurer was taken up in earnest by Montague. With Monta- 
