think." Others offer you the spectacle of genius wresting
Nature's secrets from her, and unfolding before you her sublime
messages; you will find here only a series of experiments upon
JUSTICE and RIGHT a sort of verification of the weights and
measures of your conscience. The operations shall be conducted
under your very eyes; and you shall weigh the result.

Nevertheless, I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the
abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law.
Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my
argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.

One day I asked myself: Why is there so much sorrow and misery
in society? Must man always be wretched? And not satisfied with
the explanations given by the reformers,--these attributing the
general distress to governmental cowardice and incapacity, those
to conspirators and emeutes, still others to ignorance and
general corruption,--and weary of the interminable quarrels of
the tribune and the press, I sought to fathom the matter myself.
I have consulted the masters of science; I have read a hundred
volumes of philosophy, law, political economy, and history: would
to God that I had lived in a century in which so much reading had
been useless! I have made every effort to obtain exact
information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections,
continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments,
and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most
rigorous logic. In this laborious work, I have collected many
interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the
public as soon as I have leisure. But I must say that I
recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of