strict. His spirited definition of the word "projects" included
Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, as well as Captain Phipps's scheme
for raising the wreck of a Spanish ship laden with silver. He is
sometimes credited with remarkable shrewdness in having anticipated in
this Essay some of the greatest public improvements of modern times--the
protection of seamen, the higher education of women, the establishment
of banks and benefit societies, the construction of highways. But it is
not historically accurate to give him the whole credit of these
conceptions. Most of them were floating about at the time, so much so
that he had to defend himself against a charge of plagiarism, and few of
them have been carried out in accordance with the essential features of
his plans. One remarkable circumstance in Defoe's projects, which we may
attribute either to his own natural bent or to his compliance with the
King's humour, is the extent to which he advocated Government
interference. He proposed, for example, an income-tax, and the
appointment of a commission who should travel through the country and
ascertain by inquiry that the tax was not evaded. In making this
proposal he shows an acquaintance with private incomes in the City,
which raises some suspicion as to the capacity in which he was
"associated with certain eminent persons in proposing ways and means to
the Government." In his article on Banks, he expresses himself
dissatisfied that the Government did not fix a maximum rate of interest
for the loans made by chartered banks; they were otherwise, he
complained, of no assistance to the poor trader, who might as well go to
the goldsmiths as before. His Highways project was a scheme for making
national highways on a scale worthy of Baron Haussmann. There is more
fervid imagination and daring ingenuity than business talent in Defoe's
essay; if his trading speculations were conducted with equal rashness,
it is not difficult to understand their failure. The most notable of
them are the schemes of a dictator, rather than of the adviser of a free
Government. The essay is chiefly interesting as a monument of Defoe's
marvellous force of mind, and strange mixture of steady sense with
incontinent flightiness. There are ebullient sallies in it which we
generally find only in the productions of madmen and charlatans, and yet
it abounds in suggestions which statesmen might profitably have set
themselves with due adaptations to carry into effe