Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the Several States of Europe

BARLOW, Joel. Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government. Part I. New-York: Re-printed by Childs and Swaine, 1792. 1st American ed. (4), 118 pp. Orig. self-wrapperes, stitched as issued. Disbound. Archival repair to blank corner of title page where a previous owner's name was cut off, else a very good copy. Very scarce. Part one is complete in itself. Although Barlow, the author of The Vision of Columbus, was a New Englander, he was much beloved by the French and was eventually made an honorary French citizen. "More significant was the first part [1792] of his Advice to the Privileged orders, a stirring political document which disposes of the critics who label Barlow merely as the grandiloquent versifier. In debt, unquestionably, to Paine's greater work, The Rights of Man, it is still unique. It forcibly presents the doctrine of the responsibility of the State, a doctrine as admissably true today as it was then heretical to Barlow's college friends. If these in Hartford denounced, there must have been comfort in Fox's eulogy of the book in the House of Commons. The British Government, in compliment to its vigor, suppressed the volume and proscribed the writer. Barlow sought refuge in Paris, where he calmly wrote the second part of this, his greatest prose work." --DAB. Evans 24075; Sabin 3414.