length.

Released from his printing-office on the 1st of March of the same year,
Proudhon had to look for a chance to earn his living. Messrs. Gauthier
Bros., carriers by water between Mulhouse and Lyons, the eldest of whom
was Proudhon's companion in childhood, conceived the happy thought
of employing him, of utilizing his ability in their business, and in
settling the numerous points of difficulty which daily arose. Besides
the large number of accounts which his new duties required him to make
out, and which retarded the publication of the "System of Economical
Contradictions," until October, 1846, we ought to mention a work, which,
before it appeared in pamphlet form, was published in the "Revue des
Economistes,"--"Competition between Railroads and Navigable Ways."

"Le Miserere, or the Repentance of a King," which he published in
March, 1845, in the "Revue Independante," during that Lenten season when
Lacordaire was preaching in Lyons, proves that, though devoting himself
with ardor to the study of economical problems, Proudhon had not lost
his interest in questions of religious history. Among his writings on
these questions, which he was unfortunately obliged to leave unfinished,
we may mention a nearly completed history of the early Christian
heresies, and of the struggle of Christianity against Caesarism.

We have said that, in 1848, Proudhon recognized three masters. Having
no knowledge of the German language, he could not have read the works
of Hegel, which at that time had not been translated into French. It
was Charles Grun, a German, who had come to France to study the various
philosophical and socialistic systems, who gave him the substance of the
Hegelian ideas. During the winter of 1844-45, Charles Grun had some long
conversations with Proudhon, which determined, very decisively, not the
ideas, which belonged exclusively to the bisontin thinker, but the form
of the important work on which he labored after 1843, and which was
published in 1846 by Guillaumin.

Hegel's great idea, which Proudhon appropriated, and which he
demonstrates with wonderful ability in the "System of Economical
Contradictions," is as follows: Antinomy, that is, the existence of two
laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible,
not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing.
Considered in their thesis, that is, in the law or tendency which
created them, all the economical categories are rati