DEFOE’S essay “Upon Projects” is a series of short essays on topics whose sole connection with each other is that they have some bearing direct or incidental on something or other which Defoe thought should be done. He treats of “Banks,” “Court Merchants,” “Life Insurance,” or “The Education of Women,” with equal facility,—a facility which suggests the habits of the modern journalist. Defoe is entitled, indeed, to rank as the first of the great journalists of England. His paper, the London Review, published from 1704 to 1713, began as a weekly, but was issued finally as a triweekly. While it was scarcely a newspaper in the modern sense, Defoe certainly had the “journalistic instinct.” “State facts” has been given as the single rule necessary for the complete education of a journalist, and Defoe, if he did not govern himself by it in his political writings, certainly accomplished the paradox of making it the rule of his fiction. In all his novels, but especially in “Robinson Crusoe,” he seems to be concerned with nothing except making a simple statement of unimpugnable facts which have come within his personal knowledge. As a story-teller, he has hardly been surpassed, but as is usual with the Immortals, his popularity with posterity became possible only after he had suffered almost, if not quite, all his own generation could conveniently inflict on him. He was well acquainted with the interior of debtors’ prisons, and his vigor as a political pamphleteer won him the honor of the pillory, where the London mob, instead of covering him with filth, as was their habit, protected him from insult and offered him flowers. Defoe was a martyr, however, because his intellectual activity made him so by accident,—not because he had or professed to have a higher moral standard than that of his generation. He failed as a merchant for £17,000, and, after release by his creditors on a compromise, paid them in full; but as a journalist opposing a Tory administration, it is said that he did not find it incompatible with his principles to take a subsidy to be earned by “omitting objectionable matter” and “toning down” the vigor of his opposition. It is asserted, however, that he was, “according to his lights, a perfectly honest man … of unaffected religiosity.” He may be defined as a man of genius, with a defective moral sense and an intellect of incessant activity. His minor novels reflect faithfully the manners and morals of people with whom it is not well to be familiarly acquainted,—in or out of books,—and his own perfect familiarity with them goes far towards accounting for the fact that his “religiosity” failed to have a more decisive influence on his life. This much must be said to qualify the praise due him as the author of “Robinson Crusoe” and the essay “Upon Projects,”—works made permanently influential by the benevolence and philanthropy which, in spite of his lack of governing principle, operated as Defoe’s governing motives. He was born in London in 1661. His father James Foe, was a butcher, wealthy enough to send him to “a famous Dissenting academy” at Stoke Newington, where he seems to have escaped almost wholly the shackling influence of the orthodox English scholastic tradition. He was twice married, and six of his seven children were living at his death, April 26th, 1731. In 1877 three of his descendants were pensioned because of his merits,—merits which were officially recognized during his lifetime only in ways which made his sentence to the pillory the most honorable incident of his relations with the government.