“2. That the pensioner be charged, in case he should publish a second edition of his book, to omit the dedication;
“3. That this judgment of the Academy be placed upon the records.
“These three propositions, put to vote, are adopted.”
After this ludicrous decree, which its authors thought to render powerful by giving it the form of a contradiction, I can only beg the reader not to measure the intelligence of my compatriots by that of our Academy.
While my patrons in the social and political sciences were fulminating anathemas against my brochure, a man, who was a stranger to Franche-Comté, who did not know me, who might even have regarded himself as personally attacked by the too sharp judgment which I had passed upon the economists, a publicist as learned as he was modest, loved by the people whose sorrows he felt, honored by the power which he sought to enlighten without flattering or disgracing it, M. Blanqui—member of the Institute, professor of political economy, defender of property—took up my defence before his associates and before the ministry, and saved me from the blows of a justice which is always blind, because it is always ignorant.
It seems to me that the reader will peruse with pleasure the letter which M. Blanqui did me the honor to write to me upon the publication of my second memoir, a letter as honorable to its author as it is flattering to him to whom it is addressed.
