The operations shall be conducted under your very eyes; and you shall weigh the result.
Nevertheless, I build no system.

I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law.

Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.
One day I asked myself: Why is there so much sorrow and misery in society?
Must man always be wretched?
And not satisfied with the explanations given by the reformers,--these attributing the general distress to governmental cowardice and incapacity, those to conspirators and emeutes, still others to ignorance and general corruption,--and weary of the interminable quarrels of the tribune and the press, I sought to fathom the matter myself.

I have consulted the masters of science; I have read a hundred volumes of philosophy, law, political economy, and history: would to God that I had lived in a century in which so much reading had been useless! I have made every effort to obtain exact information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections, continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments, and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most rigorous logic.

In this laborious work, I have collected many interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the public as soon as I have leisure.