ives some interesting details of
this lawsuit.

In possession of the Suard pension, Proudhon took part in the contest
proposed by the Academy of Besancon on the question of the utility
of the celebration of Sunday. His memoir obtained honorable mention,
together with a medal which was awarded him, in open session, on the
24th of August, 1839. The reporter of the committee, the Abbe Doney,
since made Bishop of Montauban, called attention to the unquestionable
superiority of his talent.

"But," says Sainte Beuve, "he reproached him with having adopted
dangerous theories, and with having touched upon questions of practical
politics and social organization, where upright intentions and zeal for
the public welfare cannot justify rash solutions."

Was it policy, we mean prudence, which induced Proudhon to screen his
ideas of equality behind the Mosaic law? Sainte Beuve, like many others,
seems to think so. But we remember perfectly well that, having asked
Proudhon, in August, 1848, if he did not consider himself indebted in
some respects to his fellow-countryman, Charles Fourier, we received
from him the following reply: "I have certainly read Fourier, and have
spoken of him more than once in my works; but, upon the whole, I do not
think that I owe anything to him. My real masters, those who have caused
fertile ideas to spring up in my mind, are three in number: first, the
Bible; next, Adam Smith; and last, Hegel."

Freely confessed in the "Celebration of Sunday," the influence of the
Bible on Proudhon is no less manifest in his first memoir on property.
Proudhon undoubtedly brought to this work many ideas of his own; but
is not the very foundation of ancient Jewish law to be found in its
condemnation of usurious interest and its denial of the right of
personal appropriation of land?

The first memoir on property appeared in 1840, under the title, "What is
Property? or an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government."
Proudhon dedicated it, in a letter which served as the preface, to the
Academy of Besancon. The latter, finding itself brought to trial by its
pensioner, took the affair to heart, and evoked it, says Sainte Beuve,
with all possible haste.

The pension narrowly escaped being immediately withdrawn from the bold
defender of the principle of equality of conditions. M. Vivien, then
Minister of Justice, who was earnestly solicited to prosecute the
author, wished first to obtain the opinion of the e