(1850; 80 pages) William Batchelder Greene’s 1850 Mutual Banking has the same name as the various editions published in the 20th century, but it is in many ways a remarkably different book. Written at the time of the earliest “mutual bank propaganda,” a series of petition drives based in rural western Massachusetts, aimed at repealing state restrictions on banking and currency, it reflects concerns closely connected to Greene’s location and vocation. It was, after all, the Rev. Mr. William B. Greene,—pastor of the Unitarian assembly in South Brookfield, recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and well known in Boston intellectual and social circles,—and not the elder statesman of the Boston Anarchists, who authored the work, writing in the throes of discovery, as he attempted to wed the philosophies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Pierre Leroux to the land bank forms of colonial New England. The book takes the form of a series of sermons on texts drawn from his wide reading in philosophy and economics. By 1857, when the financial panic of that year led him to revise and reissue the work, combining it with his elements from his 1849 "Equality," Greene’s focus was much more narrowly financial. The resulting work was unquestionably more coherent, more accessible, and it is that work which became the enduring classic of the individualist anarchist movement. But the earlier edition teaches us much more about Greene himself, and about the variety of concerns that drove philosophical radicals in the first half of the 19th century. Also included: “Human Pantheism,” a short version of Greene's essay on transcendentalism.