projects to facilitate the transit have latterly expanded into Captain Ead's ship-railway, and the attention
on railroads and internal improvements. A few pamphlets in the French and English languages are to be found in this collection, which is being yearly increased.
William Maclure, Opinions on Various Subjects, Dedicated to the Industrious Producers. New Harmony, Indiana. Printed at the School Press, 1831 and 1857, 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 483 and 556. The author states that six of the essays contained in his 1st volume were written at Paris, in 1819, at the request of the editor of the Revue Encyclopedique, for publication, but were excluded by the censors of the press as too democratic. They were afterward translated into Spanish, and published in Madrid, and subsequently in the New Harmony Gazette, under the dates annexed to them in his book-form edition, the first of which is dated Feb. 22, 1826. The remaining essays were published in the Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, and the Disseminator, periodicals al. o issued at New Harmony. Those of which his 2d volume is comprised appeared at irregular intervals in the last-named publication, and were presented to the public in book form in 1837.
Maclure's work is devoted to philosophical observations on education, politics, morals, and religion, and to an analysis of the conduct of church and state in his own and past times. It was while independence was yet young in Mexico, and many questions of vital interest to civilization which have since been settled were but ill understood, that this man wrote; yet there is much in his words worthy of our attention. The author begins by discussing the opposition of interests between producers and non-producers. His principles of political economy would hardly be accepted at the present day, deriving, as they do, the strength and power of the commonwealth from the governors rather than from the people; nevertheless, as regarding the effects of climate on politics, and other great questions affecting society, he was as able and original as Buckle; and had his position in the world been as prominent, and the opportunities for making known his thoughts as good, he would have divided with the English philosopher his fame. The British and French governments, their colonies, and the like, he calls a government of checks, wherein bribery and corruption are essential to balance. In the government of Sweden, the peasants, the clergy, the burgesses, and the nobles each have independent representation, and beggary and robbery there is unknown. Despotism may be easier fed vi warm climates than in cold; intellectual progress makes its most rapid strides between extremes. This author was evidently somewhat of a traveller for that day, for he speaks of the several quarters of the globe as an eye-witness; and he must have been endowed with liberal ideas withal, denouncing the impositions and hypocrisies of the clergy, prophesying that 'the riches collected by the religious industry of ages may perhaps help to pay for the expenses of obtaining freedom, and make atonement at its dissolution for the misery, blood, cruelty, and oppression exercised in wresting it from those that produced it.' And again, 'even the property hoarded by the church may become the means of spreading moral and physical perfection, and aid in the general amelioration of society.' What his ideas of moral perfection may be, I leave the reader to infer from the following remark made in speaking of the openness, the artless freedom, and absence of embarrassment with which the lower class, men and maids and matrons alike, performed those necessities of their nature which the higher culture has stamped as private. 'False delicacy and moral hypocrisy,' he calls the sentiment of shame that leads people to hide under clothes and between walls certain parts of their person, and those acts of nature's requirements and human existence, of which all are fully aware. 'All of these evils would be cured by an accurate knowledge of reality, and permitting the gratification of the physical appetites, without attaching either a religious sin or civil crime to acts on winch depends the existence of
