Peale here appeals for financial assistance for his museum founded in the 1780s, which, in 1816, like Peale himself, was in financial duress. He presents his museum as a public benefit to city; he cites its benefits as an attraction to the city as well as a place of learning. He looks back with bitterness stating that even “with all this… the institution does not maintain itself.” Peale believed that a museum could only exist with a liberal endowment.  It had been “madness … to form a school of useful knowledge, to diffuse its usefulness to every class of our country, to amuse and in the same moment to instruct the adult, as well as the youth of each sex and age.”

      American Imprints 38567, see Sellers, Charles Coleman, Peale’s Museum and “The New Museum Idea” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Feb. 29, 1980, Vol. 124, No. 1, pp. 25-34. https://ww.jstor.org/stable/986654