Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just maturity.

His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities." The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme of Mercier, and in A.D.2440 this will be duly recognised.

But the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely abolished.

There is no preventive censorship to hinder publication, but there are censors.

There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are admonitions.