(1849; 68 pages) American mutualism starts here. William Batchelder Greene’s 1849 Equality was the first entry in the mutual banking literature for which he is most famous. Largely compiled from a series of articles contributed to the Worcester Palladium, it shows the Rev. Mr. William B. Greene, a young Unitarian minister and Seminole War veteran, just graduated from Harvard, struggling to draw together a wide variety of interests and influences, while attempting to address directly the economic needs of his neighbors and parishioners in western Massachusetts. The title of the work echoes Pierre Leroux’s De la Egalité, and Leroux is certainly the dominant influence, but Greene was already well on the way to marrying the neo-christianity of Leroux to the colonial/Proudhonian land-bank model, out of which would grow his own form of anarchist mutualism. "Equality" and the 1850 "Mutual Banking" make up the only exposition we have of that “Christian Mutualism,” and together they stand out as one of the most ambitious expressions of antebellum American radicalism. This edition also includes A New Gnosis, a strange, but interesting bit of theological speculation, also published in pamphlet form in 1849.