to the established Government, and against a dynasty which might plausibly be mistrusted of respect for visible accumulations of private wealth.  Defoe’s projects were of an extremely varied kind.  The classification was not 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 effect.  The Essay on Projects might alone be adduced in proof of Defoe’s title to genius.