onsent to enter the balance with these manipulators of law,
misnamed JURISTS; and for my part I object to a comparison.

2. Reason of intention. As far as I am permitted to divulge this secret,
I am a conspirator in an immense revolution, terrible to charlatans and
despots, to all exploiters of the poor and credulous, to all salaried
idlers, dealers in political panaceas and parables, tyrants in a word of
thought and of opinion. I labor to stir up the reason of individuals to
insurrection against the reason of authorities.

According to the laws of the society of which I am a member, all the
evils which afflict humanity arise from faith in external teachings and
submission to authority. And not to go outside of our own century, is
it not true, for instance, that France is plundered, scoffed at, and
tyrannized over, because she speaks in masses, and not by heads? The
French people are penned up in three or four flocks, receiving their
signal from a chief, responding to the voice of a leader, and thinking
just as he says. A certain journal, it is said, has fifty thousand
subscribers; assuming six readers to every subscriber, we have three
hundred thousand sheep browsing and bleating at the same cratch. Apply
this calculation to the whole periodical press, and you find that, in
our free and intelligent France, there are two millions of creatures
receiving every morning from the journals spiritual pasturage. Two
millions! In other words, the entire nation allows a score of little
fellows to lead it by the nose.

By no means, sir, do I deny to journalists talent, science, love
of truth, patriotism, and what you please. They are very worthy and
intelligent people, whom I undoubtedly should wish to resemble, had I
the honor to know them. That of which I complain, and that which has
made me a conspirator, is that, instead of enlightening us, these
gentlemen command us, impose upon us articles of faith, and that without
demonstration or verification. When, for example, I ask why these
fortifications of Paris, which, in former times, under the influence
of certain prejudices, and by means of a concurrence of extraordinary
circumstances supposed for the sake of the argument to have existed, may
perhaps have served to protect us, but which it is doubtful whether
our descendants will ever use,--when I ask, I say, on what grounds they
assimilate the future to a hypothetical past, they reply that M.
Thiers, who has a great mind, h