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John Zube, 7 Oxley St., Berrima, NSW 2577       16/May/88

Kevin Dowd, Lecturer in Economics, Crookesmoor Bldg., Conduit Rd., Sheffield S10 1FL

Dear Kevin,
            It was with great pleasure that I received today your letter of May 10 & enclosures : Scott on Scottish Banking and some reviews of Hake/Wesslau's boooks. I had filmed one of the latter's, Free Trade in Capital, but am still trying to get "The Coming Individualism".
   Only yesterday did I make another attempt to find Scott's letters on free banking at the local large second-hand bookshop. It has a whole Bookshelf full of his writings but, no collected works issue. According to the introduction by P.H. Scott, they were apparently out of print for over 100 years! A cursory perusal of entries under his name in my 1984 editions of US and UK books in print revealed only the edition of which you sent me a photocopy. I guess with a systematic search I could have found it myself in some Australian library - but then there are simply too many titles that I still want to give each of them enough attention.

   I could not resist reading the book and the reviews right away and only just finished them. Except for the copyrighted excellent introduction by P.H. Scott, I intend to reproduce them in one of the next monetary freedom microfiche. Many thanks.
   The instance of a excellent, humerous ( very important ) and well published letters being able to stop or long postpone acute restrictive legislative efforts was also welcome to me. What crimes are committed in the name of "unification" and "streamlining"! I still think Scott to have been right on most points.
Presently, I am trying myself to compile a persuasice enough circular, 4 pp, to be sent with my literature list, PP 759, to the close to 200 libertarian periodicals, in an attempt to persuade them to take up the microfiche option themselves to some extent, after sufficiently examining and discussing it in their columns and to try to persuade, between them, a mere 100 libertarian activists like myself to take up the fiching option, all with the aim of making at last all libertarian writings cheaply and flly accessible, even if only on microfiche. 100 such activists could within a year produced 7,000 libertarian books and tenthousands of other writings - and that might finally be enough to draw sufficient readers and further libertarian publishers to this option. Is it really easier to persuade libertarians of anything than parliamentarians? If I succeed with them, do they have sufficient persuasive powers to persuade 100 libertarians to take up ficing as I did? If their persuasive powers are not sufficient for this, they might as well give up pleading most of their libertarian causes. Will enough of them take up book publishing, like e.g. Tucker did, but on microfiche and thus on a much larger scale? Microfilm existed already in Tucker's time and could have saved e.g. Spooner's manuscripts before they were burned with Tucker's library.

   My o/s trip times have not yet been fixed. Thanks very much for the invitation. I hope that I can take you up on it. Perhaps we might only meet when you have settled in the U.S., if you do.

   I'm prepared to wait for the final article versions - provided they are not abridged for lack of space. White was particular about copying his early mimeo on Scottish banking, later developed into his book, including the English banking history. I got a pirated photocopy of this early mimeo from someone. Indeed, many authors are pleased if someone takes an interest in their mimeoed articles - but often they have no copies left themselves, either. And the microfiche publishing option itself is not yet attractive enough to most.

   As for spelling mistakes and typos. I make myself so many of them and discover my own so incompletely and successively only, that I simply resolved to save time by not attempting do to more than one proof reading, knowing fully that further readings would discover more - while leaving still all too many. 

   If one comes down to final details of theories, one will probably discover some differences. However, they are rather unimportant as long as one favours monetary freedom in theory and in practical experiments. 
   Like many others, Meulen was too committed to his own version of free banking to be fully interested in all of monetary freedom with its numerous different free banking options and to do justice to some alternative theories and proposals. However, he kept the light burning, almost single-handedly in the U.K., for at least some form of free banking, for decades.

   I did not meet Meulen, either but just corresponded with him. And our correspondence almost never dealt with any personal affairs but just with some ideas which we shared or clashed on. The same is true for most of the other correspondence with him that I have seen. I noted some postcards and letters as book marks in his remaining works in the Goldsmith Collection.

Otherwise, his granddaughter, Cordelia Turner, is probably most interested in him and his work. She still had, back in 1984, some boxes with his material stacked at a former address. She is probably also the one who has access to the remaining ca. 200 copies of Free Banking. I asked once at the Economist Bookshop, whether they would be interested in such a remainder sale. They said : Yes, at 5 % of their retail price! I have so far not filmed it, fearing that a publisher as large as MacMillan might get its heckles up about piracy, even if only on fiche, but failed to enquire for formal permission. It might not be refused. Cordelia was interested in getting the set of The Individualist completely filmed and promised on the phone to help me in this. But I did not get around to visit her during my two short London visits or to write her and I managed to lose  her address and have not yet got it back from Robert Carnaghan, who knows also the address of 2 sons. For any personal details of Meulen's life, you would better contact his family. One of the sons wrote a short history of the Personal Rights Association, which I have filmed. Otherwise, one can largely only read between the lines of The Individualist. While I would be interested in reading some details of his life, if someone else went to the trouble of compiling them, I am more interested in seeing his free banking ideas fully reproduced, discussed and criticized where this seems necessary. 
   Pauline Russell and Robert Carnaghan knew him personally.

   From what I heard, he corresponded with almost any "name" of the anarchist and free market movement and his corresponcence, if recoverable from his correspondents, with their permission, would form a very valuable collection.
   In his burning of most of his correspondence we may have another case which leads to some questioning of the absolute right of property as a right to destroy. It is rather undoubted re e.g. private clothing or crafts articles, even car etc. but was probably rightly questioned regarding one's house, if e.g. someone should be so annoyed with and mad about it to want to burn it down or blow it up.. For writings, we have come to doubt it regarding the papers of public figures like presidents and prime ministers. A similar case could be made for any writings of some public interest, better perhaps scientific and historical interest, of writers and publishers like Meulen and many of his correspondents. I read a while ago that boxes of Robert Ingersoll's materials were destroyed by the Library of Congress, without e.g. some of the atheists and rationalists in the U.S. being given a chance to bid for them.
However, what is done cannot be undone. One can only hope that many of his correspondents or their heirs have not acted likewise and that sooner or later most of this correspondence can thus be recovered. I try to recover e.g. correspondence by Ulrich von Beckerath, of which his side was burned in an air raid on Berlin. If in future such resources could also be cheaply enough put onto CD-ROM, they would be all the more helpful. I have found this computer to be too small to index whatever I have of Beckerath's letters. In the meantime, for the letters themselves, to the extent that one can gather them, we have the micrographic option and just have to get it sufficiently publicized to get it widely enough used. I notice that the B.I.P. editions mentioned some previously unpublished correspondence with Sir W. Scott! So sometimes it has taken so far more than a hundred years!

   Glad to hear that you are one of the few young advocates of free banking now existing. Sometimes too much of a generation gap develops, leading to decades in which certain important ideas and practices become almost completely forgotten or are not further developed. I was introduced to such ideas by Ulrich von Beckerath, when I was 18 and he 70, back in 1952. Writings on free banking were then and there ( West Berlin) still harder to come by than they are now and we did not even have the funds to get the "Berlin Programme" duplicated, far less printed.

   Have you got any of the issues of The Individualist, which I still listed as missing in 1985 in my file, waiting to be filmed? Still no change since then. Promises are easier to get than actions.

   When you send me some more printed or photocopied material, it will do fine if you send it by sea.

   I still hold that an alphabetical primer introducing free banking ideas and experiences, with cross references, would be more helpful to many than systematical or historical tomes and intend to work further during an upcoming 1 month holiday with my eldest in Cairns on such a manuscript. While I may be unable to bring even such a limited work to a satisfactory conclusion, having still had access to and read only a fraction of all the relevant literature and not being a clear and persuasive writer, I hope that my first filming of the incomplete draft will elicit some corrections and supplements and that these, when filmed in a revised edition, that will lead to more and more editions and revisions until finally not only a satisfactory primer will be achieved but also a hand-book on the monetary freedom option, with bibliography, abstracts, addresses and every significant term and experience, proposal and argument at least somewhat mentioned and discussed. Access to such ideas should not be strenuous effort stretching over decades, as it is today, for individuals. And x writings of this kind remain still untranslated even into the major languages.

I am now including PP 11,41, 731,732,735-743 for your collection.
 
       PIOT, John.