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William Batchelder Greene‘s theological works are almost unknown today, but they form the immediate context for his better-known works on mutual banking, which were written while he was the minister of a Unitarian church in South Brookfield, MA. Like my predecessors, I’ve been a bit remiss in concentrating on these works, at least where the archive is concerned, but I’ve started to address that problem with a pdf edition of The Doctrine of the Trinity :Briefly and Impartially Examined in the Light of History and Philosophy (1847). A look at the chronological bibliography of Greene’s work places this pamphlet, between […]

In 1877, Lewis Masquerier, aged and going blind, collected such of his newspaper articles and short essays as he felt represented, however partially, his social thought. The result was Sociology: or, The reconstruction of society, government, and property, upon the principles of the equality, the perpetuity, and the individuality of the private ownership of life, person, government, homestead, and the whole product of labor, by organizing all nations into townships of self-governed homestead democracies–self-employed in farming and mechanism, giving all the liberty and happiness to be found on earth, another of those “books by a man too busy to write […]

I’ve been too darn busy to post much about what I’m reading these days, but I spent a delightful half-hour this afternoon drinking some good Grounds for Thought coffee and reading print-outs of a couple of blogs. Not surprisingly, a lot of what I had to catch up on was from the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left crowd. Here’s some highlights: Freeman, libertarian critter, who has given his blog a nice remodeling, reads from the Agorist Quarterly on land enclosures, and comments on Reisman‘s review of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. The decentralized dust-up continues! Sheldon Richman is somebody I’ve […]

Some men—not all men—see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character; but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions. What is the natural conscience if it be not a condemnation of ourselves as we are, mean, pitiful, weak, and a comparison […]

Indiana State University’s Cunningham Memorial Library has among its holding the Debs Collection of radical pamphlets. This collection, heavy on left and labor publications, is indexed online and many of the pamphlets have been scanned to pdf format. Anarchist titles are few and far between, but there are lots of items from organizations like the ACLU and the IWW, and from publishers such as Charles H. Kerr. I’ve been collecting Kerr pamphlets for years now, and have been able to scoop up pdfs of items I have never seen for sale. I’ll write up some of the more specifically interesting […]

The origin of William B. Greene’s essay on “The Right of Suffrage” has been a bit of a puzzle, as it appears without previous publication information and does not appear to have have been separately published prior to its appearance in the Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875.) Part of the mystery is solved by this column from The Word, where Ezra H. Heywood quotes from a “private letter” that obviously contained at least some of the ideas for the essay. Heywood’s closing paragraph mentions Greene’s sponsorship of “the Working Women’s Convention, held in Boston, […]

Readers familiar with the more accessible of Greene’s works will probably know his exchange with Francis Barry, reprinted from The Word, on the subject of “free love.” Barry’s letter begins with reference to an earlier statement by Greene, in the August 1874 issue. It turns out that the earlier piece is very interesting, a “legal opinion” on the subject from Greene. The first paragraph contains my favorite characterization of Greene’s work: [H]e can produce to order, almost any revolution out of the Mass’tts Bill of Rights… Enjoy! More material from The Word is on the way. FREE LOVE IN MASSACHUSETTS.—Its […]

Great news! Kenneth R. Gregg of the CLASSical Liberal blog has just posted an online edition of Stephen Pearl Andrews’ Science of Society. This was Andrews’ attempt to present the ideas of Josiah Warren in a more systematic manner. Ken has promised some more biographical work on Andrews, which ought to be worth waiting for. Somehow I missed the announcement of the edition of Andrews’ Love, Marriage and Divorce at the Molinari Institute “Heritage of Dissent” online library. The same update included Edwin C. Walker’s 1904 Communism and Conscience. Thanks to Roderick Long & Co. for their contributions of libertarian […]

Among the new items in the Libertarian Labyrinth is a short piece on military discipline in the 14th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the Civil War regiment William Batchelder Greene commanded during 1861-62. It consists of two reports of VIPs stopped by Greene or his officers among the forts on the Virginia side of the Potomac, where the 14th was stationed. Taken alone, it is an entertaining account. Taken in the context of other accounts of life around the Long Bridge (coming soon to the Layrinth), it looks like general officers didn’t take sentries very seriously, with results that were frequently as […]

Don Bangert, of the Current Observations blog, informs me that he has finished the scanning of Socialized Money, which he started back in November. Here’s my original notice of the project. I have been curious to see the rest of the book since Don began reprinting it, and had just recently tracked down a copy through interlibrary loan. Don has, in the interest of finishing things, posted image scans of the remaining chapters. I’ll see if I can find some time to do the OCR work, and complete a full-text searchable version. This is probably more a curiousity than a […]