I was glad to see that through its metaphysical dress you recognized the wise foresight of the author; and I thank you for it.

May God grant that my intentions, which are wholly peaceful, may never be charged upon me as treasonable! Like a stone thrown into a mass of serpents, the First Memoir on Property excited intense animosity, and aroused the passions of many.
But, while some wished the author and his work to be publicly denounced, others found in them simply the solution of the fundamental problems of society; a few even basing evil speculations upon the new light which they had obtained.

It was not to be expected that a system of inductions abstractly gathered together, and still more abstractly expressed, would be understood with equal accuracy in its ensemble and in each of its parts.
To find the law of equality, no longer in charity and self-sacrifice (which are not binding in their nature), but in justice; to base equality of functions upon equality of persons; to determine the absolute principle of exchange; to neutralize the inequality of individual faculties by collective force; to establish an equation between property and robbery; to change the law of succession without destroying the principle; to maintain the human personality in a system of absolute association, and to save liberty from the chains of communism; to synthetize the monarchical and democratic forms of government; to reverse the division of powers; to give the executive power to the nation, and to make legislation a positive, fixed, and absolute science,--what a series of paradoxes! what a string of delusions! if I may not say, what a chain of truths! But it is not my purpose here to pass upon the theory of the right of possession.

I discuss no dogmas.

My only object is to justify my views, and to show that, in writing as I did, I not only exercised a right, but performed a duty.
Yes, I have attacked property, and shall attack it again; but, sir, before demanding that I shall make the amende honorable for having obeyed my conscience and spoken the exact truth, condescend, I beg of you, to cast a glance at the events which are happening around us; look at our deputies, our magistrates, our philosophers, our ministers, our professors, and our publicists; examine their methods of dealing with the matter of property; count up with me the restrictions placed upon it every day in the name of the public welfare; measure the breaches already made; estimate those which society thinks of making hereafter; add the ideas concerning property held by all theories in common; interrogate history, and then tell me what will be left, half a century hence, of this old right of property; and, thus perceiving that I have so many accomplices, you will immediately declare me innocent.
What is the law of expropriation on the ground of public utility, which everybody favors, and which is even thought too lenient?
[36] A flagrant violation of the right of property.