benefit of as much stock in real value as the suppositious value of
the bills amounts to; and wherever this credit fails, this advantage
fails; for immediately all men come for their money, and the bank
must die of itself: for I am sure no bank, by the simple
improvement of their single stock, can ever make any considerable
advantage.

I confess, a bank who can lay a fund for the security of their
bills, which shall produce first an annual profit to the owner, and
yet make good the passant bill, may stand, and be advantageous, too,
because there is a real and a suppositious value both, and the real
always ready to make good the suppositious: and this I know no way
to bring to pass but by land, which, at the same time that it lies
transferred to secure the value of every bill given out, brings in a
separate profit to the owner; and this way no question but the whole
kingdom might be a bank to itself, though no ready money were to be
found in it.

I had gone on in some sheets with my notion of land being the best
bottom for public banks, and the easiness of bringing it to answer
all the ends of money deposited with double advantage, but I find
myself happily prevented by a gentleman who has published the very
same, though since this was wrote; and I was always master of so
much wit as to hold my tongue while they spoke who understood the
thing better than myself.

Mr. John Asgill, of Lincoln's Inn, in a small tract entitled,
"Several Assertions proved, in order to create another Species of
Money than Gold and Silver," has so distinctly handled this very
case, with such strength of argument, such clearness of reason, such