What is Property?

PREFACE.

Double horizontal lines separated by a small diamond-shaped ornament in the center.

The letter you are about to read served as a preface to the
first edition of this Memoir:

To the Gentlemen Members of the Academy of Besançon.

In your deliberation of May 9, 1833, concerning the
triennial pension founded by Madame Suard, you expressed
the following desire:

"The Academy invites the holder to address to it every
year, in the first fortnight of July, a succinct
and reasoned account of the various studies he has
carried out during the year that has just elapsed."

I have come, gentlemen, to fulfill this duty.

When I solicited your votes, I loudly expressed
my intention to direct my studies toward the means
of improving the physical, moral, and intellectual condition
of the most numerous and poorest class. This
thought, however foreign it might have appeared to the object of my
candidacy, you received favorably; and, by the
precious distinction with which you were pleased to honor me, you
made this solemn engagement an inviolable and sacred
obligation. I knew from then on what a worthy and honorable
company I was dealing with: my esteem for its enlightenment,
my gratitude for its benefits, my zeal for its glory,
were without bounds.

Convinced at first that, in order to emerge from the beaten path
of opinions and systems, it was necessary to bring into the study
of man and of society scientific habits and
a rigorous method, I devoted a year to philology
and grammar; linguistics, or the natural history of speech,
being of all sciences the one that