By creating talented characters, many of whom were denied the opportunity to function within a rational social and economic setting, Defoe takes up the social concerns expressed in his Essay on Projects (1697) and other early works. He concluded that the establishment of the opportunity for equality was essential for the broad prosperity of the British nation and that such prosperity could only be realized by the development of trade on a large scale. By creating a fiction that allowed him to envision the possiblities and outcomes of some of his social ideas, e.g., the transformative values of criminal transportation, he could assess the value of recovering the services of a talented portion of the populace lost to crime. Though his settings are in the era of the Stuarts, the social and moral lessons are always applicable to the Hanoverian present. --