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found every art and science a perfect whole. Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order: the one by a new alphabet, and the other by a new constitution.' The new alphabet of this modest reformer we have not had the fortune to see; it seems, however, that the first edition either of his New Constitution, or his Trial, was printed in what he calls his natural or philosophical orthography.' His political opinions were first propounded in the form of a Lecture, read before the Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1775, and printed immediately afterwards; from which time, he says, 'he went on continually publishing them in one shape or other.' They are fully and harmlessly explained in his 'Constitution of Spensonia, a country in Fairy Land; situated between Utopia and Oceana.' The Spensonian Commonwealth is one and indivisible;' and, the Sovereign People is the Universality of Spensonian citizens.' Divested of such nonsensical language, which was then in full vogue, and too much of which still passes current, his scheme is, That the soil belongs to the state, and that individuals should rent their lands and tenements from their respective parishes; the rent being the revenue, and the surplus, after all public expenses are defrayed, to be divided equally among all the parishioners; every kind of property being permitted except in land. The larger estates are to be leased for one and twenty years, and at the expiration of that term re-let by public auction; the smaller ones by the year and larger ones subdivided as the increase of population may require. The legislative power is vested in an annual parliament, elected by universal suffrage, women voting as well as men, the executive is in the hands of a council of twentyfour, half of which is to be renewed annually. Every fifth day is a sabbath of rest,-not of religion; for though this constitution is proclaimed in the presence of the Supreme Being, no provision is made for worshipping Him. All the Spensonians are soldiers; and in the Spensonian Commonwealth, Nature and Justice know nothing of illegitimacy.' To the end of this Constitution an Epilogue is annexed, in decent verse, saying that the Golden Age will no longer be accounted fabulous, now that mankind are about to enjoy

And these verses,-to shew the strange humour of the man, and the vulgarity which adhered to him, are followed by a Chorus,' to the tune of Sally in our Alley:'

Then let us all join heart in hand
Thro' country, town, and city,

Of every age and every sex,
Young men and maidens pretty;

To

To haste this Golden Age's reign
On every hill and valley,-
Then Paradise shall greet our eyes

Thro' every street and alley.'!

In any other age this might have gone quietly to the family vault. But the French Revolution made Spence suppose that the time for realizing his speculations was arrived; and the manner in which he proposed to do this, brought him under the cognizance of the Attorney-General,--how deservedly, a brief specimen of his philanthropical proposals will shew:~

'We must destroy,' he says, 'all private property in land. The Landholders are like a warlike enemy quartered upon us for the purpose of raising contributions, therefore any thing short of a total destruction of the power of these Samsons will not do; and that must be accomplished, not by simple shaving,'-(look to it, Mr. Coke, of Norfolk !) not by simple shaving, which leaves the roots of their strength to grow again;-no: we must scalp them, or else they will soon recover, and pull our Temple of Liberty about our ears. Nothing less than a complete extermination of the present system of holding land will ever bring the world again to a state worth living in. But how is this mighty work to be done? I answer it must be done at once. For the public mind being suitably prepared by my little tracts, a few contiguous pa rishes have only to declare the land to be theirs, and form a Convention of parochial deputies: other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example; and thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic instantaneously arise in full vigour. In fact, it is like the Almighty saying, Let there be light, and it was so :-So the people have only to say, Let the land be ours, and it will be so. For who, pray, are to hinder the people of any nation from doing so, when they are inclined? Are the landlords more numerous in proportion to the people than the officers in our mutinous fleets were to their crews? Certainly not. Then landsmen have nothing to fear more than the seamen, and indeed much less; for after such a mutiny on land, the masters of the people would never become their masters again.'

For this publication the Scalping Philanthropist was most deservedly prosecuted; having before richly entitled himself to this distinction by a periodical farrago called Pig's Meat,' wherein the same doctrines were promulgated, and circulated in the cheapest form among the lower classes of tradesmen and mechanics. We remember to have heard that he excited compassion at his trial

* This, as may be supposed, was a favourite passage with the author. He adds in a note, that the overbearing power of great men by their revenues, and the power of Samson by his hair, are strikingly similar, and shew such men to be dangerous companions in society, till scalped of their hair, or revenues. For it is plain, that if the Lords of the Philistines had scalped Samson, instead of only shaving him, they might have saved both their lives and their temple.' The Philistines in France were of this opinion, and to make short work as well as sure, they employed a machine which took off head and all

by

by his wretched appearance, and the pitiable fanaticism with which he was possessed: for the man was honest; he was not one of those demagogues who, like Cobbett, make mischief their trade because they find it a gainful one; he asserted nothing but what he believed, and would have suffered martyrdom for his opinions. He called himself, in his defence, The unfeed advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam.'

'This, Gentlemen,' said he, is the Rights of Man! and upon this Rock of Nature have I built my Commonwealth, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.' I solemnly avow,' he continued, that what I have written and published has been done with as good a conscience, and as much philanthropy, as ever possessed the heart of any prophet, apostle, or philosopher, that ever existed. And indeed I could neither have lived or died in peace, having such important truths in my bosom unpublished.'

-A tough fellow one that seemed to stand
Much on a resolute carelessness, and had
A spice of that unnecessary thing

Which the mysterious call Philosophy.

He stood alone, he said, unconnected with any party, and considered as a lunatic, except by a thinking few. Even the professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him, and would rather, if they could consistently, join in the suppression than the support of his opinions. He pleaded his own cause, being too poor to retain either attorney or counsel. And when he was brought up to judgment, the simple statement which he gave of his treatment in Newgate, ought to have produced some reform in the scandalous state of our prisons.

'Perhaps, my lords,' said he, 'I have entertained too high an opinion of Human Nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients. I have very small encouragement indeed to rush into a prison, on various accounts. For, in the first place, the people without treat me with the contempt due to a lunatic; and the people within treat me as bad, or worse, than the most notorious felon among them. And what with redeeming and ransoming my toes from being pulled off with a string while in bed, and paying heavy and manifold fees, there is no getting through the various impositions.'

But he excused the Keeper of Newgate, saying these things were unknown to him, because it was dangerous to complain; for nobody could conceive what dreadful work went on among such ruffians, but those who have had the misfortune to be locked up with them.'

It is fortunate that this man was not a religious as well as a political enthusiast. He was poor and despised, but not despicable; for he was sincere, stoical, persevering, single-minded, and self-approved; with means less powerful, doctrines less alluring,

in far less favourable times, and under circumstances equally or more discouraging, Francis of Assissi and Loyola succeeded in establishing those orders which have born so great a part in the history, not only of the Romish Church, but of the world. No doctrine could be more directly subversive of the peace and welfare of society, than those which he was disseminating in the way which was most dangerous. The appropriate punishment (for they who can be blind to the danger, and who assert that such doctrines should be suffered to circulate unrestrained, are fitter inhabitants for Anticyra than for England) would have been transportation; at once doing justice to the community by preventing a repetition of the offence, and dealing mercifully with the offender by removing him to a country where he would be inoffensive, if not useful. He was sentenced to a fine of twenty pounds, and one year's imprisonment at Shrewsbury; a sentence so lenient as to shew that Lord Kenyon very properly regarded the individual with pity the mildness of the sentence is honourable to the judge-its inadequacy is not so to the laws. Having suffered it, he became an itinerant vender of books and * pamphlets, chiefly his own works, and which he carried about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose, and he supported himself, whilst all his leisure was devoted to the promotion of his plan, till his death, which happened about two years ago. Thus it appears that for more than twelve years after the termination of his confinement, he was constantly employed in sowing the dragon's teeth! The harvest is now beginning to appear.

Let us hear the evidence of the Monthly Magazine upon this subject. This Journal asserts, that the late rioters were ' actuated by their convictions in favour of a plan published by one Spence, for the more equal occupation of land; to introduce which plan societies seem to have been formed throughout the metropolis. It also claims for itself the merit of advancing the same principles as those of the Scalping Philanthropist : for these are its words: :

'Much curiosity being excited in regard to the Spencean Plan of Public Economy, it will be useful to state, that the details of the' system may be found in a small pamphlet called Christian Policy, by Thomas Evans, Librarian to the Society of Spencean Philanthropists,' at No. 8, Newcastle-street, Strand. Mr. Evans appears to have been most cruelly used by the Pitt administration: and having been drilled into the science of politics in the school of persecution, his pamphlet is, written with considerable energy. We collect from it that the main object of the Society is a more equal occupation (not proprietorship) of

*The second edition of his Trial (now before us) was one of these pamphlets: it contains the whole of the work for which he was prosecuted.

land,

land. A principle which has often been urged in the pages of this Magazine. Something must be radically wrong, if industry should suffer from want in a country in which there are but two and a half million of families to forty-two millions of acres of cultivated land, affording, under a wise policy, the produce of seventeen acres to every family, or four times as much as it could consume. Skilful labour in any branch of useful industry ought therefore to yield abundance, even though the proprietary in land should remain exactly as it does at present.'

Thus far the Magazine of Sir Richard Phillips, Knight and ExSheriff, Buonapartist, Lamenter for the Battle of Waterloo, Chiefmourner for Marshal Ney, Member of the Society for Abolishing War, Pythagorean and Spencean Philanthropist.

There is however another person to be examined in this causeThomas Evans, the librarian, himself. And here, the first thing, which appears is, that Mr. Evans, instead of having been drilled into the science of politics in the school of persecution, as the Pythagorean Journal asserts, was in reality sent to that school in consequence of being too forward as a volunteer in the said science; Mr. Evans telling us that he was arrested during the suspension of the Habeas Corpus, as being at that time Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, and having given in his present pamphlet good reason for concluding that he was not arrested without good cause. Though this librarian has affixed the title of Christian Policy to his book, he makes no other pretension to the character of Christian himself than as a Spencean philanthropist, and informs us, that this man, Christ, was a Roman slave, crucified as a slave (the mode of execution peculiar to Roman slaves) for preaching the seditious doctrine that God was the proprietor of the earth, and not the Romans; that all men were equal in his sight, and and consequently ought not to be slaves to another, nor to the Romans, for which he was crucified by the Romans. Mr. Evans is equally well read in history and in the Gospel! This is quite enough of his religion; let us look now at his political information. France, he says, at the beginning of the Revolution, supplicated peace upon bended knees, and would have conformed to just and reasonable restraints:—the authority for this important fact must be in the Spencean library, for it certainly exists no where else. England, however, went to war, and in the course of the war discovered that the export of grain was the most lucrative branch of trade. This produced the blockading system, and the orders in council; and this monopoly having been lost, all the means of greatness on which the empire depended are passed away as it were in a moment, never to return. Such has been the effect of the impolicy of putting down Napoleon to elevate Alexander.

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