The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume X Part 31

Such is the real moral nature of the State--its true and higher task.

This is so truly the case that for all time it has been carried out through the force of circ.u.mstances, by the State, even without its will, even without its knowledge, even against the will of its leaders.

But the working cla.s.s, the lower cla.s.ses of society in general, have, on account of the helpless position in which their members find themselves as individuals, the sure instinct that just this must be the function of the State--the aiding of the individual, by the union of all, to such a development as would be un.o.btainable by him merely as an individual.

The State then, brought under the control of the idea of the working cla.s.s, would no longer be driven on, as all states have been up to this time, unconsciously and often reluctantly, by the nature of things and the force of circ.u.mstances; but it would make this moral nature of the State its task, with the greatest clearness and complete consciousness. It would accomplish with ready willingness and the most complete consistency that which, up to this time, has been forced only in the dimmest outlines from the opposing will, and just for this reason it would necessarily promote a nourishing of intellect, a development of happiness, education, prosperity, and liberty, such as would stand without example in the world's history, in comparison with which the most lauded conditions in earlier times would drop into a pale shadow.

It is this which must be called the political idea of the working cla.s.s, its conception of the purpose of the State, which, as you see, is just as different, and in a perfectly corresponding manner, from the conception of the purpose of the State in the capitalist cla.s.s as the principle of the working cla.s.s--a share of all in the determination of public policy, or universal suffrage--is from the corresponding principle of the capitalist cla.s.s--the property qualification.

The line of thought here developed is therefore what must be p.r.o.nounced the idea of the working cla.s.s. It is that which I had in view when, at the beginning, I spoke of the connection between the particular period of history in which we live and the idea of the working cla.s.s. It is this period, beginning with February, 1848, which has the task of bringing such a political idea to realization, and we may congratulate ourselves that we have been born in a time which is destined to see the accomplishment of this most glorious work of history, and in which we have the privilege of lending a helping hand.

But for all who belong to the working cla.s.s there follows from what I have said the duty of an entirely new att.i.tude. Nothing is more effective in impressing upon a cla.s.s a dignified and deeply moral stamp than the consciousness that it is destined to be the ruling cla.s.s; that it is called upon to elevate the principle of its cla.s.s to the principle of the whole historical period; to make its idea the leading truth of the whole of society, and so, in turn, to shape society into a reflection of its own character. The lofty historical honor of this destiny must lay hold upon all your thoughts. It is no longer becoming to you to indulge in the vices of the oppressed, or the idle distractions of the thoughtless, or even the harmless frivolity of the insignificant. You are the rock upon which the church of the present is to be built.

The lofty moral earnestness of this thought should entirely fill your mind, should fill your hearts and shape your whole life to be worthy of it and conformable to it. The moral earnestness of this thought, without ever leaving you, must stand for better thoughts in your shop during your work, in your leisure hours, your walks, your meetings; and, even when you lie down to rest on your hard couch, it is this thought which must fill and occupy your soul until it pa.s.ses into the realm of dreams. The more exclusively you fill your minds with this moral earnestness, the more undividedly you are influenced by its warmth--of this you may be a.s.sured--the more you will hasten the time in which our present historical period has to accomplish its task, the sooner you will bring about the fulfilment of this work.

If, among those who listen to me today, there were even two or three in whom I have succeeded in kindling the moral warmth of this thought, with that fullness which I mean and which I have described to you, I should consider even that a great gain, and account myself richly rewarded for my presentation.

Above all, your soul must be free from discouragement and doubt, to which an insufficiently valid consideration of historical efforts might easily lead. So, for instance, it is absolutely false that in France the Republic was overthrown by the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851.

What could not maintain itself in France, what really was destroyed at that time, was not _the_ Republic but _that_ republic, which, as I have already shown you, abolished, by the law of May 30, 1850, the universal franchise, and introduced a disguised property qualification for the exclusion of the workingman. It was the capitalist republic which wished to put the stamp of the _bourgeoisie_--the domination of capital--upon the republican forms of the State; it was this which gave the French usurper the possibility, under an apparent restoration of the universal franchise, to overthrow the Republic, which otherwise would have found an invincible bulwark in the breast of the French workingman. So what in France could not maintain itself, and was overthrown, was not the Republic, but the _bourgeois_ republic; and, on really correct consideration, the fact is confirmed, even by this example, that the historical period which began with February, 1848, will no longer tolerate any State which, whether in monarchical or in republican form, tries to impress upon it, or maintain within it, the controlling political stamp of the third cla.s.s of society.

From the lofty mountain tops of science the dawn of a new day is seen earlier than below in the turmoil of daily life.

Have you ever beheld a sunrise from the top of a high mountain? A purple line colors blood-red the farthest horizon, announcing the new light. Clouds and mists collect and oppose the morning red, veiling its beams for a moment; but no power on earth can prevail against the slow and majestic rising of the sun which, an hour later, visible to all the world, radiating light and warmth, stands bright in the firmament. What an hour is, in the natural phenomena of every day, a decade or two is in the still more impressive spectacle of a sunrise in the world's history.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: The word _bourgeoisie_ is henceforth used throughout the discussion to designate the political party now defined.--TRANSLATOR.]

[Footnote 48: Here the speaker quotes statistics showing that, on the average, throughout Prussia, a vote by a man of the first cla.s.s has as much weight as seventeen votes by men of the third cla.s.s.--TRANSLATOR.]

SCIENCE AND THE WORKINGMEN (1863)

[A speech delivered by La.s.salle in his own defense before the Criminal Court of Berlin on the charge of having incited to cla.s.s hatred.]

TRANSLATED BY THORSTEIN B. VEBLEN, PH.D. Lecturer in Economics, University of Missouri

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court:

I shall have to make my beginning with an appeal to your indulgence.

My defense will go somewhat into detail. It will, on that account, necessarily be somewhat long. But I consider myself justified in pursuing this course, first, by the magnitude of the penalty with which I am threatened under Section 100 of the Criminal Code--the full extent of this penalty amounting to no less than two years'

imprisonment. In the second place, and more particularly, I consider my course justified by the fact that this trial by no means centres about a man and the imposition of a penalty.

You will, therefore, permit me, without further preliminary, to carry the discussion from the region of ordinary court-room routine to that higher level on which it properly belongs.

The indictment brought against me is an evil and deplorable sign of the times. It not only offends the common law, but it is a notable violation of the Const.i.tution. This is the first count in the defense which I have to offer.

I. Article 20 of the Const.i.tution reads: "Science and its teaching is free."

What may be the meaning of this phrase in the Const.i.tution, "is free,"

unless it means that science and its teaching are not subject to the ordinary provisions of the Criminal Code? Is this expression, "Science and its teaching is free," perhaps to be taken as meaning "free within the limits of the general provisions of the criminal code?" But within these limits every expression of opinion is absolutely free--not only science and its teaching. So long as they live within the general specifications of the criminal code, every newspaper writer and every market woman is quite free to write and say whatever they choose. This liberty, which is conceded to all expressions of opinion, need not and could not be proclaimed by a special article of the Const.i.tution as a peculiar concession to "science and its teaching."

To put such a construction upon this article of the Const.i.tution amounts to reading it out of the Const.i.tution, to so interpreting it that it has nothing to say,--which is in our time by no means a neglected method of quietly putting the Const.i.tution out of the way.

Now, the first principle of legal interpretation is that a provision of law must not be so interpreted as to make it superfluous or absurd, or to virtually expunge it. This, of course, applies with peculiar force to an article of the Const.i.tution. There can accordingly be no doubt, Gentlemen, that precisely this was the intention of this provision of the Const.i.tution; namely, that the prerogative was to be conceded to science that it should not lie under the limitations which the general criminal code imposes upon every-day, trivial expressions of opinion.

It is easy to understand that the legislature of any country will seek to protect the inst.i.tutions of the country. In the nature of the case, the laws forbid inciting the citizens of a country to disorderly outbreak against the const.i.tuted authority.

Indeed, if we accept certain current views of law and order we have no difficulty in understanding that the law may consistently forbid all such appeal to the pa.s.sions as is designed to foster contempt and disregard of existing conventions, or to stir up sentiments of hatred and distrust in their populace through a direct appeal to the unstable emotions.

But what is in the eternal nature of things free, on which no limits must be imposed, the importance of which to the State itself is greater than that of any single provision of law, to the free exercise of which no provision of law can set bounds--that is the impulse to scientific investigation.

No situation and no inst.i.tution is perfect. Such a thing may happen as that an inst.i.tution which we are accustomed to consider the most unimpeachable and indispensable, may, in fact, be vicious in the highest degree, and be most seriously in need of reform.

Will any one deny this whose view comprehends the changes which history records since the days of the Hindus or the Egyptians? Or even if he looks no further than the narrow s.p.a.ce of the past one hundred years?

The Egyptian fellah warms the hearth of his squalid mud hut with the mummies of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the all-powerful builders of the everlasting pyramids. Customs, conventions, codes, dynasties, states, nations come and go in incontinent succession. But, stronger than these, never disappearing, forever growing, from the earliest beginnings of the Ionic philosophy, unfolding in an ever-increasing amplitude, outleaping all else, spreading from one nation and from one people to another, and handed down, with devout reverence, from age to age, there remains the stately growth of scientific knowledge.

And what is the source of all that unremitting progress, of all that uninterruptedly, but insensibly, broadening amelioration which we see peacefully accomplishing itself in the course of history, if it is not this same scientific knowledge? And, this being so, science must have its way without restraint; for science there is nothing fixed and definite, to which its process of chemical a.n.a.lysis may not be applied, nothing sacred, no _noli me tangere_. Without free scientific inquiry, therefore, there is no outcome but stagnation, decline and barbarism. And, while free scientific inquiry is the perennial fountain-head of all progress in human affairs, this inquiry and its gradually extending sway over men's convictions, is at the same time the only guarantee of a peaceable advance. Whoever stops up this fountain, whoever attempts to prevent its flowing at any point, or to restrain its bearing upon any given situation, is not only guilty of cutting off the sources of progress, but he is guilty of a breach of the public peace and of endangering the stability of the State. It is through the means of such scientific inquiry and its work of painstaking elaboration that the exigencies of a progressively changing situation are enabled gradually, and without harm, to have their effect upon men's thinking and upon human relations, and so to pa.s.s into the life of society. Whoever obstructs scientific inquiry clamps down the safety valve of public opinion, and puts the State in train for an explosion. He prohibits science from finding out the malady and its remedy, and he thereby subst.i.tutes the resulting convulsions of the death struggle for a diagnosis and a judicious treatment.

Unrestrained freedom of scientific teaching is, accordingly, not only an inalienable right of the individual, but, what is more to the point, it is, primarily and most particularly, a necessity of life to the community; it involves the life of the State itself.

Therefore has society formulated the provision that "Science and its teaching is free," without qualification, without condition, without limits; and this proviso is incorporated into the Const.i.tution, in order to make it plain that it must remain inviolate even at the hands of the law-giver himself, that even he must not for a moment overlook or disregard it. And so it serves as pledge of the continual peaceable development of social life down to the remotest generations.

Does a question present itself at this point, Gentlemen? Am I setting up a new and unheard-of theory on this head?

Am I, possibly, misconstruing the wording of the Const.i.tution in order to extricate myself from an embarra.s.sing criminal process?

On the contrary, nothing is easier than to prove to you from the evidences of history that this provision of the Const.i.tution has never been taken in any other sense; that for long centuries before the days of the Const.i.tution this theory has been current among us in usage and practice; that it is by ancient tradition a characteristic feature of the culture of all Germanic peoples.

In the days of Socrates, it was still possible to be indicted for having taught new G.o.ds (Greek: katnos theous), and Socrates drank the hemlock under such an indictment.

In antiquity all this was natural enough. The genius of antiquity was so utterly identified with the conditions of its political life, and religion was so integral an element in the foundations of the ancient State, that the ancient mind was quite incapable of divesting itself of these convictions, and so getting out of its integument. The spirit of antiquity must stand or fall with its particular political conventions, and, in the event, it fell with them.

Such being the spirit of those times, it follows that any scientific doctrine which carried a denial of any element of the foundations of the State was in effect an attack upon the nation's life and must necessarily be dealt with as such.

All this changes when the ancient world pa.s.ses away and the Germanic peoples come upon the scene. These latter are peoples gifted with a capacity to change their integument. By virtue of that faculty for development that belongs to the guiding principle of their life, viz.: the principle of the subjective spirit,--by virtue of this, these latter are possessed of a flexibility which enables them to live through the most widely varied metamorphoses. These peoples have pa.s.sed through many and extreme transformations, and, instead of meeting their death and dissolution in the process, they have by force of it ever emerged on a higher plane of development and into a richer unfolding of life.[49]

The means by which these peoples are able to prepare the way for and to achieve these trans.m.u.tations through which they constantly emerge to that fuller life, the rudiments of which are inborn in them, is the principle of an unrestrained freedom of scientific research and teaching.

Hence it comes that this instinct of free thought among these peoples reaches expression very early, much earlier than the modern learned world commonly suspects. "We are mistakenly in the habit of thinking of free scientific inquiry as a fruitage of modern times. But among these peoples that instinct is an ancient one which a.s.serts that free inquiry must be bound neither by the authority of a person nor by a human ordinance; that, on the contrary, it is a power in itself, resting immediately upon its own divine right, superior to and antedating all human inst.i.tutions whatever.