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tells me that the danger of a break up would happen most likely from writing you too often. When we can meet, the aspects of many things will change and clear up between us. Until then I am frankly risking my purposes, not keeping anything from you.

You, philosophers, are capable of everything with your resoning; I have no desire for it to be proven to me, via letter, that I'm an ass, having, however, to range among the higher rank of men, after an oral explanation. In your letter you ironically admire the balance of my mental faculties in the middle of the present circumstances. And in your last kind (?) lines, you make an opponent of freedom out of me. The truth is that my mental faculties are almost balanced, because I consider France's current misfortune as the greatest thing that nation could experience. Regarding what concerns the matter of freedom, everything comes down to, according to what I understand, a simple matter of words. I will never agree to indentify freedom with political freedoms: in what you call freedom, I don't see anything but liberties. And what I call the fight for freedom, is but the never-ending and live conquest of the idea of freedom. A man for whom freedom ceases to be a good that is ardently desired, only has something lifeless and soulless; because the notion of liberty carries in itself constant gratefulness. If anyone, during the struggle, stops while shouting: "I've got it," will prove precisely that he has lost it.

But this barren posession of some liberties, is characteristic of societies run by States, of which I have said is not a good thing. Surely it can be good to possess freedom of vote, exemption fo taxes, etc., etc. But, for who is that good? For the citizen,