nstitute at the time when I presented my
report upon your book. I knew that they wished to proceed against you in
the courts; you perhaps do not know by how narrow a chance I succeeded
in preventing them. [5] What chagrin I should always have felt, if
the king's counsel, that is to say, the intellectual executioner, had
followed in my very tracks to attack your book and annoy your person! I
actually passed two terrible nights, and I succeeded in restraining
the secular arm only by showing that your book was an academical
dissertation, and not the manifesto of an incendiary. Your style is too
lofty ever to be of service to the madmen who in discussing the gravest
questions of our social order, use paving-stones as their weapons. But
see to it, sir, that ere long they do not come, in spite of you, to
seek for ammunition in this formidable arsenal, and that your
vigorous metaphysics falls not into the hands of some sophist of the
market-place, who might discuss the question in the presence of a
starving audience: we should have pillage for conclusion and peroration.

"I feel as deeply as you, sir, the abuses which you point out; but I
have so great an affection for order,--not that common and strait-laced
order with which the police are satisfied, but the majestic and imposing
order of human societies,--that I sometimes find myself embarrassed
in attacking certain abuses. I like to rebuild with one hand when I am
compelled to destroy with the other. In pruning an old tree, we guard
against destruction of the buds and fruit. You know that as well as any
one. You are a wise and learned man; you have a thoughtful mind. The
terms by which you characterize the fanatics of our day are strong
enough to reassure the most suspicious imaginations as to your
intentions; but you conclude in favor of the abolition of property! You
wish to abolish the most powerful motor of the human mind; you attack
the paternal sentiment in its sweetest illusions; with one word you
arrest the formation of capital, and we build henceforth upon the sand
instead of on a rock. That I cannot agree to; and for that reason I
have criticised your book, so full of beautiful pages, so brilliant with
knowledge and fervor!

"I wish, sir, that my impaired health would permit me to examine with
you, page by page, the memoir which you have done me the honor to
address to me publicly and personally; I think I could offer some
important criticisms. For the moment, I