Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was done. Rarely, however, has a man worked under such tremendous disadvantages. Lebreton had increased his original capital when he hired Diderot, but he never paid his editor more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the other people who were supposed to lend their assistance, well, we all know how those things are. They were either busy just then, or they would do it next month, or they had to go to the country to see their grandmother. With the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the work himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped upon him by the officials of both the Church and the State. Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not because so many people want them but because so many people are glad to get rid of them. The book which a century and a half ago was howled down as a manifestation of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and harmless tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative element among the clergy of the eighteenth century, it sounded like a clarion call of destruction, anarchy, atheism and chaos. Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the editor-in-chief as an enemy of society and religion, a loose reprobate who believed neither in God, home or the sanctity of the family ties. But the Paris of the year 1770 was still an overgrown village where every one knew every one else. And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of life was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually lived up to this motto, who kept open house for all those who were hungry, who labored twenty hours a day for the sake of humanity and asked nothing in return but a bed, a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded, hard-working fellow was so shining an example of those virtues in which the prelates and the monarchs of that day were so conspicuously lacking, that it was not easy to attack him from that particular angle. And so the authorities contented themselves with making his life just as unpleasant as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage, by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding Diderot’s home, by confiscating his notes and occasionally by suppressing the work altogether. These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling. It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of the true perspective.