Ferdinand Lassalle:
Science and the Workingmen. 
An argument in his own defense before the Criminal Court of Berlin on the charge 
of having publicly incited the unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of 
the propertied classes.
A Translation of "Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter."
By Thorstein Veblen, The University of Chicago.
(New York: The International Library Publishing Co., 1900, 84 pp.)
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[3] Prefatory Note.
As on an earlier occasion, in the case of the defense which he proposed making 
before the Rhenish jury, Lassalle had put his proposed defense in print before 
the date set for the trial, so also as regards the address which is here 
reprinted.
This is the argument in refutation of the absurd charge that he had, in his 
Workingmen's Programme, seditiously incited the destitute classes to hatred and 
distrust of the well-to-do. And this address came near sharing the fate of the 
earlier one and remaining a written argument only, instead of an actually spoken 
address. In the course of the proceedings, which were held on the sixteenth of 
January, 1863, Lassalle was repeatedly called to order by the judge with the 
threat that he would be deprived of his right to speak if he proceeded in the 
manner in which he had begun. But Cassette countered the threat by threatening 
in his turn wholly to retire from the defense and withdraw from the courtroom 
with his counsel if any restraint were imposed on his criticism of the 
indictment. And with this threat he carried his point. Lassalle, having offended 
the public prosecutor with comments which, however inoffensive in form, were, 
none the less, sufficiently disparaging in substance, the presiding judge in 
fact debarred him from further speech. Still, on appealing to the whole bench 
for a reversal of this [4] ruling, and putting forth the full force of his 
argumentative power in support of his appeal and in criticism of the president's 
action, he succeeded in securing a reversal of the action taken. He was allowed 
to bring his address to an end in the form in which he had written it. The 
indictment was, at best, but a specious fabrication, which was scarcely worth 
the honor which his attention conferred. Lassalle convincingly exposed its 
shallowness and, at the same time, confuted the public prosecutor, 
Schelling(*1), afterwards Minister of Justice von Schelling, out of the mouth of 
his own father, the philosopher Schelling. Yet he was found guilty and sentenced 
to four months' imprisonment under the law referred to above - that notorious 
passage in the Prussian code, then in force, relating to hatred and contempt. It 
may be added, the prosecution had moved for a penalty of not less than nine 
months' imprisonment.

The proceedings of this turbulent trial, as well as the preposterous decision of 
the court, is recited with critical comments by Lassalle in his pamphlets under 
the title of the "Lassalle Criminal Trial." These two pamphlets, taken together 
with his speech on "Science and the Workingmen," were published by Lassalle as 
making a collected whole. It should be said that the official version of the 
proceedings in court, as well as the published decision, by no means faithfully 
reproduce the incidents of the trial and the oral discussion.
[5] The substance of the address requires no special comment. As regards its 
bearing on social and political questions, what has elsewhere been said of the 
Workingmen's Programme will apply here. In point of literary quality it is a 
masterpiece of forensic oratory. It is a point worth noting that in closing his 
address Lassalle alludes to the demagogical manœuvres which the government 
partisans were already at that time entering upon with a view to break up the 
forces of social reform. Against these endeavors at sowing discord he exclaims: 
"We, the bourgeoisie and workingmen together, are members of a single nation and 
will stand firmly together against our oppressors."
On the other hand, it was also this trial that afforded an occasion for 
Schultze-Delitsch, afterwards bitterly attacked by Lassalle, to break a lance 
for him on the floor of the Prussian House of Deputies. The occurrence and the 
occasion for it are of interest in going to show how, even at that time, the 
Prussian government endeavored to play off the workingman against the liberal 
bourgeois.
In the year 1862 the American war had brought about a serious depression in the 
cotton industry. The greater number of mills were compelled to shut down or to 
limit their operations. The consequences of this for the, workingmen is plain 
enough. Throughout the cotton districts, unemployment and privation prevailed 
and threatened to develop into a state of utter destitution. The distress was 
particularly pronounced in the region of. Reichenbach, in Silesia, and the 
manufacturers of this district accordingly, in August 1862, addressed a memo-
[6]rial to the president of the district calling attention to the "critical 
situation" of affairs and begging him to- take measures to remedy the 
prospective distress among the weavers during the succeeding winter. To this 
memorial the president of the district made a reply, and it is really worth 
while to unearth the words he used: "It is taken as a matter of course that the 
manufacturers, all and several, will first have done what is possible in the way 
of relieving the distressed weavers by their own means. This expectation seems 
the more reasonable since, for years past, the manufacturers have, as a general 
thing, been gaining, while the condition of the workingmen has remained in the 
same deplorable state." The president of the district, therefore, as he goes on 
to say, awaits such proposals as the manufacturers may make.
Such proposals they did not fail to make, and among other suggestions there was 
one to build a workhouse for the accommodation of the unemployed. This proved 
open to criticism, and the gentlemen presently received a second communication 
from the president of the district, to this effect:
"I apprehend that such a proposition on the part of the manufacturers will incur 
for them the hatred of the laboring population; and not without reason. The 
matter at issue is to preserve from starvation A numerous population which has, 
through no fault of their own, fallen into serious straits, and this population 
is one which has scarcely ever been in a position to lay by a penny for a time 
of need, and by whose work other men have grown rich. Does this call for a 
workhouse?"
This objection would have been very much to the [7] point if the president had 
been able to offer a better remedy. But there is nothing of that kind. The 
manufacturers were, one and all, liberals, and their leader and spokesman, 
Leonor Reichenheim, was, moreover, a progressist deputy; and the sole purpose of 
the president of the district was to read them all a lesson. It may be remarked, 
by the way, that this was the same president who afterwards brought the 
notorious Weaver's Delegation on the scene, and who called into being the still 
more notorious Weavers' Association, with State aid - to the total amount of 
6,000 thalers.
Both of these responses of the president of the district were published in the 
Provinzialzeitung für Schlesien and, naturally enough, attracted no little 
attention. As may easily be imagined, the progressists were provoked, and they 
brought the matter to the attention of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies in the 
form of an interpellation. The matter was under consideration on the twenty-
second of January 1863 - just six days after Lassalle had been tried and 
sentenced to four months' imprisonment for an address which seems almost tame in 
comparison with the passages just cited. It was on occasion of this 
interpellation that Schultze-Delitsch upbraided the minister, who took the part 
of the president of the district, with tolerating this offense at the same time 
that Lassalle whose address was of a purely scientific nature, was cited before 
the court. He, Schultze-Delitsch, felt called upon to call particular attention 
to this fact, although he by no means agreed with Lassalle.
So far as to this point. It is further to be remarked [8] that the public 
prosecutor, Schelling, in his thirst for vengeance, was not satisfied with the 
verdict obtained against Lassalle, but actually went the length of in-dieting 
him for "Contempt of the Solicitor General," committed in his defense at the 
trial. This indictment came up for action on the twentieth of April 1863, and 
procured for Lassalle a sentence of one month's additional imprisonment. Who 
would dare, after this, to question but that Herr Schelling got the upper hand 
of his antagonist?
The pamphlet published under the title: Der Lassallesche Kriminalprozess, 
Zweites Heft, contains a stenographic report of the proceedings in court, edited 
by Lassalle. In this pamphlet the reader will find, among other things, an 
account of the events that took place in connection with the confiscation of the 
Arbeiter-Programm, together with other information bearing on the occurrences 
that led up to the trial. Der Lassalle'sche Kriminalprozess, Drittes Heft, 
contains the recorded decision of the court, with critical notes by Lassalle. It 
is to he regretted that these notes are extended beyond necessity, so that the 
whole suffers from that fault. But the proof it, affords of the fallaciousness 
of the court's finding is thoroughly convincing, so that Lassalle was fully 
justified in exclaiming at the close of his review: "Now, come on! Sentence me, 
if you like! Rather would I spend four months in prison than to change, places 
with you - than to be such as you are."
Parts II. and III. of The Lassalle Trial will follow the part here printed, 
without further comment.
ED. BERNSTEIN.

NOTES ON PREFATORY NOTE
(The original notes occur at the corresponding page)
1) Schelling, it seems, having got wind of what he was to expect, was not 
present at the trial but was represented by a substitute, Prosecutor Goltz.

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[9] 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 centers 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 
Constitution. This is the first count in the defense which I have to offer.
I. Article 20 of the Constitution reads: "Science and its teaching is free."
What may be the meaning of this phrase in the Constitution, "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 [10] 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 Constitution as a 
peculiar concession to "Science and its teaching."
To put such a construction upon this article of the Constitution amounts to 
reading it out of the Constitution, 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 
Constitution 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 
Constitution. There can accordingly be no doubt, Gentlemen, that precisely this 
was the intention of this provision of the Constitution; 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 institutions of the country. In the nature of the case, the laws 
forbid inciting the citizens of a country to disorderly outbreak against the 
constituted authority.
Indeed, if we accept certain current views of law and [11] order we have no 
difficulty in understanding that the law may consistently forbid all such appeal 
to the passions 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 institution is perfect. Such a thing may happen as that an 
institution 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 anyone 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 space 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 an-[12]other, 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 
analysis 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 pains taking 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 pass 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 [13] the malady 
and its remedy, and he thereby substitutes 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 Constitution, in order to make it plain that it 
must remain inviolate even at the hands of the lawgiver 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 Constitution in order to extricate myself from an embarrassing criminal 
process?
On the Contrary, nothing is easier than to prove to you from the evidences of 
history that this provision of the Constitution has never been taken in any 
other sense; that for long centuries before the days of the Constitution 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 gods (kainous theous), and [14] 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 passes away and the German 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 
passed 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(*1).
[15] The means by which these peoples are able to prepare the way for and to 
achieve these transmutations 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 easier 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 asserts 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 im-[16]mediately upon its own divine right, superior to 
and antedating all human institutions whatever.
"Quasi lignum vitae," says Pope Alexander IV. in a constitution addressed to the 
University of Paris in 1255. "Quasi lignum vitae in Paradiso Dei, et quasi 
lucerna fulgoris in Domo Domini, est in Sancta Ecclesia Parisiensis Studii 
disciplina." "As the tree of life in God's Paradise and the lamp of glory in the 
house of God such in the Holy Church is the place of the Parisian corporation of 
learning." To appreciate the import of these words of the holy father, it should 
be borne in mind that in the Middle Ages all things whatever lived only by 
virtue of a corporate existence, so that learning' existed only as incorporated 
in a university.
It would be a serious mistake to believe that the uni-[17]versities of t he 
Middle Ages rested that prerogative of scientific censure – censura doctrinalis 
- to which they laid claim in such a commprehensive way, upon these and other 
like papal or imperial and royal decrees of establishment. Petrus Alliacensis, a 
man whom the University of Paris elected as its magnus magister in 1381, and who 
afterwards wore the archiepiscopal and also the cardinal's hat, tells us that 
not ex jure humano, not from human legislation, but ex jure divino, from divine 
law, does science derive its competence to exercise the censura; and the 
privileges and charters granted by popes, emperors and kings are nothing more 
than the acts of recognition of this prerogative of science that comes to it ex 
jure divino, or, as an alternative expression has it, ex jure naturali, by the 
law of nature. And in this, Petrus Alliacensis is substantially borne out by all 
the later scholastics.
Gentlemen, we are in the habit of giving ourselves airs and of looking down on 
the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and barbarism. But in so doing we are 
frequently in the wrong, and in no respect are we more thoroughly in the wrong 
than in passing such an opinion upon the position of science in the Middle Ages. 
Frequent and most solemn are the cases in which recognition is made of the right 
of science to raise her voice without all regard to king and pope, and even 
against king and pope.
We have recently witnessed a conflict between the government and the house of 
deputies as to the meeting of expenditures not granted by the house. An 
impression has been diligently spread abroad through the [18] country that this 
is an unheard of piece of boldness and a subversive assumption of power on the 
part of the house of deputies, and indeed there have not been wanting deputies 
who have been astonished at their own daring, and have taken some pride in it.
But, on the other hand, Gentlemen, in February 1412, the University of Paris, 
which was in no way intrusted with an oversight or a control of this country's 
fiscal affairs, took occasion to address a memorial to the King of France, 
Charles VI., as it said: "pour la chose publique du votre royaume" - on the 
public concerns of the realm. And in this memorial the university subjects the 
fiscal administration of the country, together with other branches of the 
administration, to a drastic criticism, and passes a verdict of unqualified 
condemnation upon it. This rémonstrance of the University of Paris rises to a 
degree of boldness, both in its demands and in its tone, that is quite foreign 
to anything which our house of deputies has done or might be expected to do. It 
points out that the, revenues have not been expended for the purposes for which 
they were levied - "on appert clairement, que les dictes finances ne sont point 
employées a choses dessus dictes," &c. - and it closes this its review with the 
peremptory demand: "Item, et il fault savoir, où est cette finance, - "Now, we 
have a right, to know what has become of these funds." It describes the king's 
fiscal administration, including the. highest officials, the finance ministers, 
gouverneurs and treasurers, as a gang of lawless miscreants, a band of rogues 
conspiring together for the ruin of the country. It upbraids the king himself 
with having packed the parliament of Paris, [19] and so having corrupted the 
administration of justice. It points out to him that his predecessors carried on 
the government by means of much smaller revenues: "au quel temps estoit le 
royaume bien gouverné, autrement que maintenant." - "when the country was well 
governed, as is not the case to-day." The rémonstrance goes on to picture the 
burdens which rest upon the poor, and to demand that these burdens be lightened 
by means of a forced loan levied upon the rich. And the rémonstrance closes with 
the declaration that all this, which it has set forth is, in spite of its 
length, but a very inadequate presentation of the matter, in so much that it 
would require several days to describe all the misgovernment the country 
suffered.
The university rests its right to make such a rémonstrance upon this ground 
alone, - that it is the spokes an of Science, of which all men know that it is 
without selfish interest, that there are neither public offices nor emoluments 
in its keeping, and that it is not concerned with these matters in any 
connection but that of their investigation; but precisely for this reason, it is 
incumbent upon Science to speak out openly when the case demands it.
And the conclusion to which it comes is of no less serious import than this: It 
is the king's duty, without all delay (sans quelque dilacion) to dismiss all 
comptrollers (gouverneurs) of finance from office, without exception (sans nul 
excepter), to apprehend their persons and provisionally to sequestrate their 
goods, and, Under penalty of death and confiscation of property, to forbid all 
com-[20]munication between the lower officials of the fisc and these 
comptrollers.
If you will read this voluminous rémonstrance, Gentlemen - you may find it in 
the annals of that time by Enguerrand de Monstrelet (liv. l. c. 99, Tom. II. p. 
307 et seq., ed. Douët d'Aroy) - you can not avoid seeing that, had this 
memorial been promulgated in our time., e. g., by the University of Berlin, 
there is scarce an offense enumerated in the code but would have been found in 
it by the public prosecutor. Defamation and insult of officials in the execution 
of their office, contempt and abuse of the government's regulations and the 
disposition taken by the officials, lèse majesté, incitement of the subjects of 
the State to hatred and disrespect - and, indeed, I know not what all would be 
the, offenses which our prosecutors would have discovered in the document. It is 
less than a year since, according to the newspapers, a disciplinary inquiry was 
instituted with respect to a memorial of a very different tenor, wherein one of 
our universities declined the mandatory suggestions addressed to the university 
by the ministers in regard to a given appointment.
But, at that earlier day, in the dark ages, such was not the custom. On the 
other hand, in compliance with the university's demands, the treasurer of the 
crown, Audry Griffart, together with many others of the high officers of, 
finance, was taken into custody, while others avoided a like fate only by 
escaping into a church vested with the right of asylum.
That was in 1412. But already eighty years before that date there occurred 
another, and perhaps even more [21] significant case, which I may touch upon 
more briefly. Pope John XXII. promulgated a new construction of the dogma of 
visio beatifica and had it preached in the churches. The University of Paris, - 
nec pontificis reverentia prohibuit, says the report, quominus veritati 
insistereat, - "reverence of the holy father prevented not the University from 
declaring the truth" -, although the matter then in question was an article of 
the faith and lay within a field within which the competence of the pope could 
not be doubted, still the university, on the twenty-second of January 1332, put 
forth a decree in which this construction of the dogma was classed to be 
erroneous.
Philip VI. served this decree upon the pope, then resident at Avignon, with the 
declaration that, unless he recanted as the decree required, he would have him 
burned as a heretic. And the pope, in fact, recanted, although he was then on 
his death-bed. All of which you may find set forth in Bulas, Historia 
Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris 1668, fol. Tom IV, pag. 375 et seq.).
These instances, which might be multiplied at will, may suffice to show how 
unqualified was the freedom of science even in early days, constrained by no 
punitive limitation at the hands of pope or king; for, be it remembered, in the 
Middle Ages, science had, as I have before remarked, only a corporate existence 
in its bearers, the universities. So that the view for which I speak has 
practically been accepted as much as five hundred years back, even in Catholic 
times and among Latin peoples.
But now comes Protestantism and creates its political structure, which it erects 
on precisely this broad principle [22] of free thought and free research. This 
principle has since that epoch been the foundation upon which our entire 
political life has rested. A protestant State has no other claim to existence 
than precisely this - cannot possibly exist on other ground. When has there, 
since that time, been talk of a penal prosecution in Prussia on account of a 
scientific doctrine?
Christian Wolf, at Halle, popularized the Leibnitzian philosophy, and it was 
then brought to the notice of the soldier-king, Frederick William I., that, 
according to Wolf's teaching of pre-established harmony, deserting soldiers did 
not desert by their own free will but by force of this peculiar divine 
arrangement of a pre-established harmony(*2); wherefore this doctrine, being 
spread abroad among the military, could not but be very detrimental to the 
maintenance of military discipline. It is true, this soldier-king, whose 
regiments were his State, was incensed at all this in the highest degree, and 
that he forthwith, in November 1723, issued an order-in-council against Wolf, 
ordering him on penalty of the halter, to leave Prussian ground within twice 
twenty-four hours, - and Wolf was obliged to flee. But, inasmuch as the king's 
lettres de [23] cachet in that time permitted no appeal, they are also passed 
over in history as being devoid of interest or historic significance. It may be 
added that the soldier-king had simply perpetrated a gratuitous outrage, and had 
not set the claims of law and right aside. He threatened to hang Wolf, and this 
threat be could have carried out with the help of his soldiers. Even brute force 
is not devoid of dignity when it acts openly and above-board. He did not insult 
his courts by asking them to condemn scientific teaching. It did not occur to 
him to disguise his act of violence under the forms of law.
Moreover, no sooner had Frederick the Great ascended the throne, thirty-first of 
May 1740, than he, six days later, sixth of June 1740, sent a note to the 
Councillor of the Consistory, Reinbeck, directing the recall of Wolf. Even 
Frederick William I. had repented of his violence against Wolf and had in vain, 
in the most honorable terms, addressed letters of recall to him. But Frederick 
the Great, while he too had use for soldiers, was no soldier-king, but a 
statesman. The note to Reinbeck runs: "You are requested to use your best 
endeavor with respect to this Wolf, who is a person that seeks and loves the 
truth, who is to be held in high honor among all men, and I believe you will 
have achieved a veritable conquest in the realm of truth if you persuade Wolf to 
return to us."
So it appears, then, that also this conflict serves only to add force to the 
ancient principle that scientific research and the presentation of scientific 
truth is not to be bound by any limitations or by any considerations of 
expediency, and must find its sole and all sufficient justification in itself 
alone. This principle hereby achieved [24] a new lustre and gained the full 
authentication of the crown.
Even the existence of God was not shielded from the discussion of science. 
Science was allowed, as it is still allowed, to put forth its proofs against his 
existence. The provisions of the new penal code bear only upon blasphemous 
utterances, such revilings of God as may offend those who believe otherwise, not 
upon the denial of his existence.
For many decades before the days of the Constitution the unquestioned liberty of 
science on Prussian ground had served the antagonists of Prussia as their 
supreme recourse, their chief boast and proudest ornament. You will remember the 
extraordinary sensation created by the case of Bruno Bauer, the Privat Docent on 
the theological faculty at Bonn, whom it was attempted to deprive of his 
licentia docendi(*3) at the ominous instance of the absolutist-pietistical 
Eichhorn ministry, because of his peculiar doctrine concerning the gospel. This 
was the first case during the present century in which an assault has been 
attempted upon the freedom of scientific teaching, and even this was an 
infinitely less heinous one than the present. The faculties of the university 
were deeply stirred, and for months together official pronunciamentos swarmed 
about the town; men of the highest standing, such as Marheinecke and others, 
declared that protestantism and enlightenment were threatened in their very 
foundations in case such usurpation, hitherto unheard of in Prussia, were 
allowed to take its course. And even [25] such expressions of opinion as reached 
a conclusion subservient to the ministerial view based their conclusion on the 
ground that the case in question concerned a licentia docendi in the theological 
faculty, with the fundamental principles of which Bauer's doctrines were 
incompatible. They took care expressly to declare that had the question 
concerned a licentia docendi in any one of the non-theological faculties, in a 
philosophical faculty, e.g., the decision must necessarily have been reversed. 
No one, not even Eichhorn himself, harbored the conceit that this doctrine and 
its teaching was to be dealt with by the criminal court. A teacher who spread 
abroad scientific teachings subversive of theological doctrines was deprived of 
the opportunity to proclaim his teaching from a theological chair; but to call 
in the jailer to suppress him - to that depth of subservience to absolutism had 
no one at that time descended. Alas, that Eichhorn, the much berated, could not 
have lived to see this day! With what admiration and with what gratification 
would he have looked upon his "constitutional" successors!
Even in the days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its ecclesia 
militans of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense of decency regarding 
the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty of scientific teaching from the 
indignity of that preventive censure which in those days rendered repressive 
legislation superfluous. In their search for some tenable and tangible criterion 
of the scientific character of any publication, the men of that time, it is 
true, hit upon a somewhat absurd one in making the test a test of bulk - books 
of more than [26] twenty forms were exempt from censure. But however awkward the 
outcome, the aim of the provision is not to be denied.
These ancient traditions, with more than five hundred years of prescriptive 
standing; this principle, which prevailed by usage and acceptance among all 
modern peoples long before it was embodied in legal form; this primordial 
deliverance of the spiritual life of the Germanic nations is the substantial 
fact which our modern society has now finally embodied in Article 20 of the 
Constitution and so has constituted a norm for the guidance of all later law-
givers, in other words: "Science and its teaching is free."
It is free without qualification, without limits, without bolts and bars. Under 
established law everything has its limitations, - every power, every function, 
every vested authority. The only thing which remains without bounds or 
constituted limitation, whose privilege it is to overspread and to overlie all 
established facts, in such boundless and unhindered freedom as the sun and the 
air, is the irradiating force of theoretical research.
Scientific theory must be free even to the length of license. For, even if we 
could speak of a license in science and its teaching, - which, by the way, is 
most seriously to be questioned - this is by all means a point at which an 
attempt to guard against abuse in one case would be liable in a million 
instances to put a check upon the blessings of rightful use. If any given 
measures of State, or any given class institutions, were shielded from 
scientific discussion, so that science might not teach that the arrangements in 
question are inadequate or detri-[27] mental, iniquitous or destructive, - under 
these circumstances, what genius could there be of such comprehensive reach, so 
far overtopping the spiritual level of all his contemporaries and all succeeding 
generations, as even to surmise the total extent of the loss which would thereby 
be sustained? What fruitful discoveries and developments, what growth of 
spiritual power and insight would be stifled in the germ by one such rigid 
interdict upon abuse; and what violent convulsions and what decay might not come 
upon the State in consequence of it?

The question is also fairly to be asked: what is legitimate use and what is 
abuse of science? Where lies the line between them, and who determines it? This 
discretion would have to lie, not with a court of law, but with a court made up 
of the flower of scientific talent of the time, in all departments and branches 
of science.
However enlightened your honorable body may be - and indeed the more enlightened 
the more unavoidably - this proposition must appeal to you as beyond question. 
What am I saying? The flower of the scientific talent of the time? No; that 
would not answer. The scientific genius of all subsequent time would have to be 
included; for how often does history show us the pioneers of science in sheer 
contradiction with the accepted body of scientific knowledge of their own time! 
It may take fifty, and it may often take, a hundred years of discussion in 
scientific matters to settle the question as to what is true and legitimate and 
what is abuse.
In point of fact, there has hitherto been not an [28] attempt, since the 
adoption of the constitution, to bring an indictment against any given 
scientific teaching.
Gentlemen, since 1848 - since 1850 - we have here in Prussia had many a sore and 
heavy burden to bear, and our shoulders are lame and tired with the bearing of 
them. But even under the Manteuffel-Westphalen administration, and until to-day, 
we have been spared this one indignity, of being called upon to see a scientific 
doctrine cited before the court.
The keenest attacks, attacks which, taken by themselves, might easily have been 
subject to criminal prosecution, have suffered no prosecution in any case where 
they have been embodied in a scientific work and when promulgated in the form of 
a scientific doctrine.
I am myself in a position to testify on this point. It is not quite two years 
since I published a work in which, I believe, I have succeeded in contributing 
something to the advancement of your own science, Gentlemen, - the science on 
which the administration of justice is based. The work of which I speak is my 
"System of Acquired Rights." (System der erworbenen Rechte.) In this work I take 
occasion to say (Vol. I, page 238): "Science, whose first duty is the most 
searching inquiry and concise thinking, can on this account in no way deprive 
itself of the right to formulate its conceptions with all the definiteness and 
concision which the clearness of these conceptions itself requires." And 
proceeding on this ground I go on, in the further discussion, to show that the 
agrarian legislation of Prussia subsequent to 1850 is nothing else - to quote my 
own words literally - than a robbery of the poor for the benefit of the wealthy 
landed aristo-[29] cracy, illegal and perpetrated in violation of the 
perpetrators' own sense of equity.
How easy would it not have been, if the expressions had occurred elsewhere than 
in a scientific treatise, to find that they embodied overt contempt of the 
institutions of the State and incitement to hatred and disregard of the 
regulations of the government. But they occurred in a scientific treatise - they 
were the outcome of a painstaking scientific inquiry, - therefore they passed 
without indictment.
But that was two years ago.
In return for the accusation which has been brought against me, I, in my turn, 
retort with the accusation that my accusers have this day brought upon Prussia 
the disgrace that now for the first time since the State came into existence 
scientific teaching is prosecuted before a criminal court. For what can the 
public prosecutor say to my accusation, since he concedes the substance of my 
claims, since he is compelled to acknowledge that science and its teaching is 
free, and therefore free from all penal restraint? Will he contend, perhaps, 
that I do not represent science? Or will he, possibly, deny that the work with 
which this indictment is concerned is a scientific work?
The prosecutor seems to feel himself hampered by the fact that he has here to do 
with a scientific production, for he begins his indictment with the sentence: 
"While the accused has assumed an appearance of scientific inquiry, his 
discussion at all points is of a practical bearing." The appearance of 
scientific inquiry? And why is it the appearance only? I call upon the 
prosecutor [30] to show why only the appearance of scientific inquiry is to be 
imputed to this scientific publication. I believe that in a question as to what 
is scientific and, what not, I am more competent to speak than the public 
prosecutor.
In various and difficult fields of science I have published voluminous works; I 
have spared no pains and no midnight vigils in the endeavor to widen the scope 
of science itself and, I believe, I can in this matter say with Horace:
Militavi non, sine gloria.(*4) But I declare to you: Never, not in the most 
voluminous of my works, have I written a line that was more carefully thought 
out in strict conformity to scientific truth than this production is from its 
first page to its last. And I assert further that not only is this brochure a 
scientific work, as so many another may be that presents in combination results 
already known, but that it is in many, respects a scientific achievement, a 
development of new scientific conceptions.
What is the criterion by which the scientific standing of a book is to be 
judged? None else, of course, than its contents.
I beg you, therefore, to take a look at the contents of this pamphlet. Its 
content is nothing else than a philosophy of history, condensed in the compass 
of forty-four pages, beginning with the Middle Ages and coming down to the 
present. It is a development of that objective unfolding of rational thought 
which has lain at the root of European history for more than a thousand years 
past; it is an exposition of that inner soul of things resident [31] in the 
process of history that manifests itself in the apparently opaque, empirical 
sequence of events and which has produced this historical sequence out of its 
own moving, creative force. It is, in spite of the brief compass of the 
pamphlet, the strictly developed proof that history is nothing else than the 
self-accomplishing, by inner necessity increasingly progressive unfolding of 
reason and of freedom, achieving itself under the mask of apparently mere 
external and material relations.
In the brief compass of this pamphlet, I pass three great periods of the world's 
history in review before the reader; and for each one I point out that it 
proceeds on a single comprehensive idea, which controls all the various, 
apparently unrelated, fields of development and all the different and widely-
scattered phenomena that fall within the period in question; and I show that 
each of these periods is but the necessary forerunner and preparation for the 
succeeding period, and that each succeeding period is the peculiar and 
immanently necessary continuation, the consequence and unavoidable consummation 
of the preceding period, and that these together, consequently, constitute a 
comprehensive and logically inseparable whole.
First comes the period of feudalism. I here show that feudalism, in all its 
variations, rests on the one principle of control of landed property, and I also 
show how at that time, owing to the fact that society's productive work to a 
preponderating extent consisted in agriculture, landed property necessarily was 
the controlling factor, that is to say, the feature conditioning all political 
and social power and standing.
[32] And I beg you, Gentlemen, to take note with what a strict scientific 
objectivity of treatment, how free from all propagandist bias, I proceed with 
the discussion. If there is any one datum which lends itself to the purposes of 
that propagandist bias which the public prosecutor claims to find in this 
pamphlet - namely the incitement of the indigent classes to hatred of the 
wealthy - it is the peasant wars. If there is any one fact which has hitherto 
been accepted, in scientific and in popular opinion alike, and more particularly 
among the unpropertied classes, with the fondest remembrance, as a national 
movement iniquitously put down by the strong hand of violence, it is the peasant 
wars.
Now, unmoved by this predilection and this shimmer of sentiment, with which the 
science and the popular sense have united in investing the peasant wars, I go on 
to divest these wars of this deceptive appearance and show them up in their true 
light, - that they were at bottom a reactionary movement, which, fortunately for 
the cause of liberty, was of necessity doomed to failure.
Further: If there exists in Germany an institution which, as a question of our 
own times, I abominate with all my heart as the source of our national decay, 
our shame and our impotence, it is the institution of the territorial State.
Now, the pamphlet in question is so strictly scientific and objective in its 
method, so far removed from all personal bias, that I therein go on to show that 
the institution of the territorial State was, in its time, historically a 
legitimate and revolutionary feature; that it was an idol advance, in that it 
embodied and developed the con-[33]cept of a State independent of relations of 
ownership; whereas the peasant wars sought to place the State, and all political 
power and standing on the basis of property.
I then, further, go on to show how the period of feudalism is succeeded by a 
second world-historic period. I show how, while the peasant wars were 
revolutionary only in their own delusion, there begins almost simultaneously 
with them a real revolution, namely that accumulation of capitalistic wealth 
which arose through the development of industry. This wrought a thoroughgoing 
change in the whole situation, - a change which reached its final act, achieved 
its legal acceptance, in the French Revolution of 1789, but which had in point 
of fact for 300 years been imperceptibly advancing toward its consummation.
I show in detail, which I need not here expound or recapitulate, what are the 
economic factors that were destined to push landed property into the remotest 
background and leave it relatively powerless, by making the new industrial 
activity the great lever and the bearer of modern social wealth. All this took 
place by force of the new instruments of production and the new industrial 
methods which they brought in.
I show how this capitalized wealth, which has come forward as an outcome of this 
industrial development and has grown to be the dominant factor in this second 
period, must in its turn attain the position of prerogative as the recognized 
qualification of political competence, as the condition of a voice in the 
councils and policy of the State; just as was at an earlier time the case with 
landed property in relation to the public law [34] of feudalism. I show how, 
directly and indirectly in the control of opinion, in the requirement of bonds 
and stamp duties, in the public press, in the growth of individual taxation, 
etc., capitalized wealth, as a basis of participation in public affairs, must 
work out its inherent tendency, with the same thoroughness and the same 
historical necessity as landed property had done in its time.
And this second period, which has completed its three hundred and fifty years, 
as I further go on to show, is now essentially concluded. With the French 
Revolution of 1848 comes the dawning of a new, a third historical Period. By its 
proclamation of universal and equal suffrage, regardless of property 
qualifications, this third period assigns to each and every one an equal share 
in the sovereignty, in the guidance of public affairs and public policy. And so 
it installs free labor as the dominating principle of social life, conditioned 
by neither the possession of land nor of capital.
I then develop the difference in point of ethical principles between the 
bourgeoisie and the laboring class, as well as the resulting difference in the 
political ideals of the two classes. The aristocratic principle assigned be 
individual his status on the basis of descent and social rank, whereas the 
principle for which the bourgeoisie stands contends that all such legal 
restriction is iniquitous, and that the individual must be counted simply as 
such, with no prerogative beyond guaranteeing him the unhindered opportunity to 
make the most of his capacities as an individual. Now, I claim, if we all were 
by native gift equally wealthy, equally capable, equally well educated, then 
this principle of equal op-[35]portunity would be adequate to the purpose. But 
since such equality does not prevail, and indeed cannot come to pass, and since 
we do not come into the world simply as undifferentiated individuals, but 
endowed in varying degree with wealth and capacities, which in turn result in 
differences of education; therefore, this principle is not an adequate 
principle. For, if under these actual circumstances, nothing were guaranteed 
beyond the unhindered opportunity of the individual to make the most of himself, 
the consequence must be an exploitation of the weaker by the stronger. The 
principle for which the working classes stand is this, that free opportunity 
alone
will not suffice, but that to this, for the purposes of any morally defensible 
organization of society, there must be added the further principle of a 
solidarity of interests, a community and mutuality in development.
From this difference between the two classes, in point of ethical principle, 
follows, as a matter of course, the difference in political ideals.
The bourgeoisie has elaborated the principle that the end of the State is to 
protect the personal liberty of the individual and his property. This is the 
doctrine put forth by the scientific spokesmen of the bourgeoisie. This is the 
doctrine of its political leaders, of liberalism. But this theory is in a high 
degree inadequate, unscientific and at variance with the essential nature of the 
State.
The course of history is a struggle against nature, against need, ignorance and 
impotence, and, therefore, against bondage of every kind in which we were held 
under the state of nature at the beginning of history.
[36] The progressive overcoming of this impotence, - this is the evolution of 
liberty, whereof history is an account. In this struggle we should never have 
made one step in advance, and we should never take a further step, if we had 
gone into the struggle singly, each for himself.
Now the state is precisely this contemplated unity and co-operation of 
individuals in a moral whole, whose function it is to carry on this struggle, a 
combination which multiplies a million fold the force of all the individuals 
comprised in it, which heightens a million fold the powers which each individual 
singly would be able to exert.
The end of the State, therefore, is not simply to secure to each individual that 
Personal freedom and that property with which the bourgeois principle assumes 
that the individual enters the state organization at the outset, but which in 
point of fact are first afforded him in and by the state. On the contrary, the 
end of the state can be no other than to accomplish that which, in the nature of 
things, is and always has been the function of the state, - in set terms: by 
combining individuals into a state organization to enable them to achieve such 
ends and to attain such a level of existence as they could not achieve as 
isolated individuals.
The ultimate and intrinsic end of the State, therefore, is to further the 
positive unfolding, the progressive development of human life. In other words, 
its function is to work out in actual achievement the true end of man; that is 
to say, the full degree of culture of which human nature is capable. It is the 
education and evolution of mankind into freedom.
[37] As a matter of fact, even the older culture, which has become the 
inestimable foundation of the Germanic genius, makes for such a conception of 
the State. I may cite the words of the great leader of our science, August 
Böckh: "The concept of the State must," according to him, "necessarily be so 
broadened as to make the State the contrivance whereby all human virtue is to be 
realized to the full."
But this fully developed conception of the State is, above all and essentially, 
a conception that is in a peculiar sense to be ascribed to the working classes. 
Others may cone i e this conception of the State by force of insight and 
education, but to the working classes it is, by virtue of the helpless condition 
of their numbers, given as a matter of instinct; it is forced home upon them by 
material and economic facts.
Their economic situation necessarily breeds in these classes an instinctive 
sense that the function of the State is and must be that of helping the 
individual, through the combined efforts of all, to reach a development such as 
the individual in isolation is incapable of attaining.
In point of fact, however, this ethical conception of the State does not set up 
any concept that has not already previously been the real motor principle in the 
State. On the contrary, it is plain from what has already been said, that this, 
in an unconscious way, has been the essential nature of the State from the 
beginning. This essential character of the State has always in some measure 
asserted itself through the logical constraint of the course of events, even 
when such an aim has been absent from the conscious purposes of the State, even 
[38] when opposed to the will of those in whose hands the power of control had 
rested.(*5)
In setting up this conception of the working classes as the dominant concept of 
the State, therefore, we do nothing more than articularly formulate what has all 
along, but obscurely, been the organic nature of the State, and bring it into 
the foreground as the consciously avowed end of society.
Herein lies the comprehensive unity and continuity of all human development, 
that nothing drops into the course of development from the outside. It is only 
that that is brought clearly into consciousness, and worked out on the ground of 
free choice, which has in substance all along constituted the obscurely and 
unconsciously effective organic nature of things.
With the French Revolution of 1848 this clearer consciousness has made its entry 
upon the scene and has been proclaimed. In the first place, this outcome was 
symbolically represented in that a workman was made a member of the provisional 
government; and, further, there was proclaimed universal, equal and direct 
suffrage, which is in point of method the means whereby this conception of the 
State is to be realized. February 1848, therefore, marks the dawning of the 
historical period in which the ethical principle of the work-[39]ing classes is 
consciously accepted as the guiding principle of society.
We have reason to congratulate ourselves upon living in an epoch consecrated to 
the achievement of this exalted end. But, above all, it is to be said, since it 
is the destined course of this historical period to make their conception the 
guiding principle of society, it be hooves the working classes to conduct 
themselves with all moral earnestness, sobriety and studious deliberation.
Such, expressed in the briefest terms, is the content and the course of argument 
of the disquisition in question.
What I have sought to accomplish in that argument is nothing else than to 
explain to my auditors the intrinsic philosophical content of the historical 
development, to initiate them info this most difficult of all the sciences, to 
bring home to them the fact that history is a logical whole which unfolds step 
by step under the guidance of inexorable laws.
One who gives himself up to work of this kind is entitled to address your public 
prosecutor in the words of Archimedes, when, at the sacking of Syracuse, he was 
set upon, sword in hand, by the savage soldiery while drawing and studying his 
mathematical figures in the sand: "Noli turbare circulos meos.(*6)"
To enable me to write this pamphlet, five different sciences, and more than 
that, have had to be brought into co-operation and had to be mastered: History 
in [40] the narrower sense of the term, Jurisprudence and the History of Law, 
Political Economy, Statistics, Finance, and, last and most difficult of the 
sciences, the science of thought, or Philosophy.
What a paragon of scientific erudition must the public prosecutor be, in whose 
eyes all this is not sufficient to lend a publication the attribute of 
scientific quality.
I But the indictment itself, when it is more closely examined, is seen to assign 
the ground on which this work is held to lack the requisite scientific 
character. The indictment says: "While the accused, Lassalle, has been at pains 
to give himself the appearance of scientific method in this address, still the 
address is after all of a throroughly, practical bearing."(*7)
So, it appears, then, that, according to the public prosecutor, the address is 
not scientific because it is claimed to have a practical bearing. The test of 
scientific adequacy, according to the public prosecutor, is the absence of 
practical bearing. I may fairly be permitted to ask the public prosecutor - and 
it is a Schelling whose signature this indictment bears - where he has learned 
all this. From his father? Assuredly not. Schelling the elder assigns philosophy 
no less serious a task than that of transforming the entire cultural epoch. "It 
is conceived to be too much"(*8) says he in formulating an anticipated 
objection, "to expect that philo-[41]sophy shall rehabilitate the times." To 
this his answer is: "But when I claim to see in philosophy a means whereby to 
remedy the confusion of the times, I have, of course, in mind not an impotent 
philosophy, not simply a product of workmen-like dexterity, but a forceful 
philosophy which can face the facts of life, philosophy which, far from feeling 
itself impotent before the stupendous realities of life, far from confining 
itself to the dreary business of simple negation and destruction, draws its 
force from reality and, therefore, reaches effective and enduring results."
The public prosecutor, with his brand-new and highly extraordinary discovery, 
will scarcely find much comfort with the other men of the science.
In his address to the German people, Fichte(*9) tells us: "What, then, is the 
bearing of our endeavors even in the most recondite of the sciences? Grant that 
the proximate end of these endeavors is that of propagating these sciences from 
generation to generation, and so conserving them; but why are they to be 
conserved? Manifestly only in order that they in the fulness of time shall serve 
to shape human life and the entire scheme of human institutions. This is the 
ulterior end. Remotely, therefore, even though it may be in distant ages, every 
endeavor of science serves to advance the ends of the State."
Now, Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Court, if I were to spend further speech in 
the refutation of this discovery of the public prosecutor - that impracticabil-
[42]ity is the test of science - I should be insulting your intelligence.
In the pamphlet in question my aim was the thoroughly practical one of bringing 
my readers to a comprehension of the times in which they live, and thereby 
permanently to affect their conduct throughout the course of their life and in 
whatever direction their activity may lie.
Now, then, what characteristic of scientific work is it which the public 
prosecutor finds wanting in all this? Is it, perhaps, that it falls short in 
respect of bulk? Is it the circumstance that this work is only a pamphlet of 
less than fifty pages, instead of comprising three folio volumes? But when was 
it decided that the bulk of a work, instead of its contents, is to be accepted 
as a test of its scientific character? Is the public prosecutor prepared, for 
instance, to deny that the papers presented by the members of the Royal Academy 
at their sessions are scientific productions? But nearly all of these are 
shorter than this of mine.
During the past year, as speaker for the Philosophical Society at the 
celebration of Fichte's birthday, it was my fortune to present an address in 
which I dealt intimately with the history of German metaphysics. That address 
fills only thirty-five pages as against the forty-four pages of the present 
pamphlet. Is the public prosecutor prepared to deny the character of science to 
that address because of its brevity?
Who will not, on the contrary, appreciate that the very brevity imposed by 
circumstances makes the scientific inquiry contained in this work all the more 
difficult and the more considerable? I was compelled to con-[43]dense my 
exposition within the compass of a two-hours' address, a pamphlet of forty-four 
pages, at the same time that I was obliged to conform my presentation of the 
matter to an audience on whose part I could assume no acquaintance with 
scientific methods and results. To overcome obstacles of this kind and, at the 
same time, not to fall short in point of profound scientific analysis, as was 
the case in the present instance, requires a degree of precision, close 
application and clarity of thought fax in excess of what is demanded in these 
respects in the common run of more voluminous scientific works.
I return, therefore, again to the question: What is the requirement of science 
with respect to which this address falls short? Is it, perhaps, that it offends 
the canons of science in respect of the place in which it was held?
This, in fact, touches the substantial core of this indictment, and, at the same 
time, the sorest spot of the whole. This address might well - so runs the 
prosecutor's reflection - have been delivered wherever you like - from the 
professor's chair or from the rostrum of the singing school, before the so-
called élite of the educated people; but that it was actually delivered before 
the actual people, that it was held before workingmen and addressed to 
workingmen, that fact deprives it of all standing as a scientific work and makes 
it a criminal offense, - crimen novum atque inauditum.(*10)
I might, of course, content myself with the answer that the substance of an 
address, and therefore its scientific character, is in no way affected by the 
place in which [44] it happens to have been delivered, whether it is in the 
Academy of Science, before the cream of the learned world, or in a hall in the 
suburbs before an audience of machinists.
But I owe you, Gentlemen, a somewhat fuller answer. To begin with, let me 
express my amazement at the fact that here in Berlin, in the city where Fichte 
delivered his immortal popular lectures on philosophy, his speeches on the 
fundamental features of the modern epoch and his speeches on the German nation 
before the general public, that in this place and day it should occur to any one 
to fancy that the place in which an address is delivered has anything whatever 
to do with its scientific character.
The great destiny of our age is precisely this - which the dark ages had been 
unable to conceive, much less to achieve - the dissemination of scientific 
knowledge among the body of the people. The difficulties of this task may be 
serious enough, and we may magnify them as we like, - still, our endeavors are 
ready to wrestle with them and our nightly vigils will be given to overcoming 
them.
In the general decay which, as all those who know the profounder realities of 
history appreciate, has overtaken European history in all its bearings, there 
are but two things that have retained their vigor and their propagating force in 
the midst of all that shriveling blight of self-seeking that pervades European 
life. These two things are science and the people, science and the workingman. 
And the union of these two is alone capable of invigorating European culture 
with a new life.
[45] The union of these two polar opposites of modern society, science and the 
workingman, - when these two join forces they will crush all obstacles to 
cultural advance with an iron hand, and it is to this union that I have resolved 
to devote my life so long as there is breath in my body.
But, Gentlemen, is this view something new and entirely unheard-of in the realm 
of science? Let us see what Fichte himself, in his addresses to the German 
people, has to say to the cultured classes, to whom he addresses these words: 
"It is particularly to the cultured classes of Germany that I wish to direct my 
remarks in the present address, for it is to these classes I hope in the first 
place to make myself intelligible. And I implore these classes, then, as the 
first step to be taken, to take the initiative in the work of reconstruction, 
and so, on the one hand, atone for their past deeds, and, on the other hand, 
earn the Tight to continued life in the future. It will appear in the course of 
this address that hitherto all the advance in the German nation has originated 
with the common people, and that hitherto all the great national interests have, 
in the first instance, been the affair of the people, have been taken in hand 
and pushed forward by the body of the people; so that to-day for the first time 
does it happen that the initiative in the cultural advance of the nation is 
committed to the bands of the cultured classes, and if they will but accept the 
commission it will be the first time when such has been the case. It will 
presently appear that it is quite impossible for these classes to determine how 
long the matter will yet rest in their discretion, how long the [46] choice will 
yet be open to them whether to take the initiative in this matter or not, for 
the whole matter is nearly ripe to be taken in hand by the people, and it will 
be carried out by men sprung from the body of the people, who will presently be 
able to help themselves without assistance from us."(*11)
Fichte, then, knew and proclaimed this fact, that, the realization of all the 
great national interests in the past has been the work of the common people and 
has never been carried out at the hands of the cultured classes. That, in spite 
of this knowledge, he turned to the cultured classes is due, as he himself says, 
to the hope he had of first and most readily making himself understood by them. 
It is because, in his apprehension, for the presentment of the matter to the 
people, the whole was, so he says, "only approaching readiness and maturity," 
but not yet ready and mature.
That it is possible to-day to do what in Fichte's time was recognized as the 
only fruitful thing to do, but, at the same time, as not then ready to be done, 
and there fore too serious to be undertaken, - this expresses the whole short 
step in advance that has been accomplished in Germany during the past fifty 
years; for you will seek in vain for the slightest progress on the part of the 
German government.
Fichte himself, in the passage cited, says that this advance is coming in the 
near future. This "near future" proves to have been fifty years removed, and I 
trust, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court, that you will [47] all consider 
a fifty-years' interval long enough to satisfy the requirements of the "near 
future."
But the men who, undeterred by all the difficulties of the task, put all their 
energies into this stupendous undertaking of carrying scientific knowledge and 
scientific habits of thought among the body of the people, - are they fairly 
open to the accusation of having sought to incite the indigent classes to hatred 
of the well-to-do? Do they not thereby really deserve the thanks and the 
affection of the propertied classes, and of the bourgeoisie above all?
Whence arises the bourgeoisie's dread of the people in political matters?

Look back, in memory, to the months of March, April and May, 1848. Have you 
forgotten how things looked here at that time? The power of the police was 
broken; the people filled all the streets and public places. And all streets, 
all public places and all the people in the hands of Karbe, Lindenmüller and 
other reckless agitators like them, - men without knowledge, without 
intelligence, without culture, thrown into prominence by the storm which stirred 
out political life to its depths. The bourgeoisie, seared and faint hearted, 
hiding in their cellars, trembling every instant for fear of their property and 
their lives, which lay in the hands of these coarse agitators, and saved only by 
the fact that these agitators were too good-natured to make such use of their 
power as the bourgeoisie feared they would. The bourgeoisie, secretly praying 
for the re-establishment of the police power and quaking with a fright which 
they [48] have not yet forgotten, the recollection of which still leaves them 
incapable of taking up the political struggle.
How came it that in a city which proudly calls itself the metropolis of 
intelligence, in so great a city, in the home of the most brilliant intellects, 
- how came it that the people here for mmonths together could be at the disposal 
of Karbe and Lindenmüller and could tremble before them in fear for their life 
and property. Where was the intelligence of Berlin? Where were the men of 
science and of insight? Where were you, Gentlemen?
A whole city is never cowardly.
But these men reflected and told one another: The people do not understand our 
ways of thinking; they do not even understand our speech. There is a great gulf 
between our scientific views and the ways of the multitude, between the speech 
of scientific discussion and the habits of thought of the people. They would not 
understand us. Therefore the floor belongs to the coarsest.
So they reflected and held their peace. Now, Gentlemen, are you quite sure that 
a political upheaval will never recur? Are you ready to swear that you have 
reached the end of historical development? Or are you willing to see your lives 
and property again at the mercy of a Karbe and a Lindenmüller?
If not, then your thanks are due to the men who have devoted themselves to the 
work of filling up that gulf which separates scientific thought and scientific 
speech from the people, and so to raze the barriers that divide the bourgeoisie 
and the people. Your thanks are due these men, who, at the expense of their 
utmost [49] intellectual efforts, have undertaken a work whose results will 
redound to the profit of each and all of you. These men you should entertain at 
the prytaneum, not put under indictment.
The place in which this address was held, therefore, can also not afford ground 
for exception as to its scientific character.
I have now shown you conclusively that the production is a scientific work.
But if, contrary to all expectation; this should still be questioned, although I 
do not for a moment consider it possible that it should be questioned by men as 
enlightened as you are, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court; now, in such a 
case, I seek refuge in the privilege which is accorded every cobbler and which 
you can all the less deny me, viz., to submit a question of workmanship in my 
trade to the award of men expert in the trade.
In the last resort, the question as to the scientific character of a given work 
is a question for the men of the trade, and therefore a question which may not 
be decided on a basis of common education and common culture alone, and 
therefore also not by a court of law. The question at issue does not concern 
jurisprudence, with which you are necessarily familiar, but it concerns other 
sciences with which you may well be unfamiliar, although, as a matter of chance, 
you may, in your private capacity, not your capacity as jurists, also be 
acquainted with these matters.
It is true, you may answer this question in the affirmative, your competence 
extends that far. For in very [50] many cases is the scientific character of a 
given work manifest, even to the commonly instructed intelligence.
But to pass a negative opinion in the face of the expert testimony to which I 
provisionally appeal as a subsidiary recourse;(*12) to that your competence does 
not extend, for the nicer question, whether in a given case the most profound 
researches of science may not, with a view to their readier apprehension, be 
presented in a facile and popular form, whether this fact of a facile 
presentation may not itself mark a peculiarly high achievement of scientific 
endeavor, in which all traces of the struggle, all difficulties and all the 
refractoriness of the materials handled have been successfully eliminated and 
the whole has in the outcome been reduced to the simplest and clearest terms; 
where the result presented is a scientific work of art, which, in the words of 
Schiller, has risen above the limitations of human infirmity and moves with such 
ease and freedom as to give the impression that it offers but the free play of 
the auditor's own unfolding thought; to decide with confidence whether you have 
to deal with a scientific work of this class, and to decide it with that 
certainty and security that is required in order to, pass a sentence, that is 
something of which none but men trained in the science are capable.
This question, therefore, I beg that the following gentlemen:
Privy Counsellor August Böckh,
Efficient Privy Counsellor Johannes Schultze, formerly Director of the Ministry 
of Public Worship,
[51] Professor Adolf Trendelenburg,
Privy Counsellor and Chief Librarian Dr. Pertz,
Professor Leopold Ranke,
Professor Theodor Mommsen,
Privy Counsellor Professor Hanssen,
all members of the Royal Academy of Science, and as specialists capable of 
judging in the matter, be constituted a subsidiary tribunal to pass on the 
question whether the address in question is not in the strict sense a scientific 
production.
But, if such is found to be the case, then, as I have already explained, it has 
nothing to do with the penal code.
I have permitted myself to go exhaustively into an exposition of this, my first 
ground of defense, because, for the sake of the country itself and the dignity 
and liberty of science, and for the sake of establishing once for all a 
precedent which shall bar out all similar endeavors of the public prosecutor in 
the future, it is incumbent on me to adjure you to acquit me under Article 20 of 
the Constitution.
But it is not that recourse to this article is necessary to protect my person 
from the penalty of the law.
For, even were it held that the present case comes within the competence of the 
penal code, the law appealed to has in no wise been violated, and the paragraph 
cited by the public prosecutor has no application.
Even this one exception alone would suffice to set the indictment aside; viz., 
that no objection is taken to any given passage in which the specified offense 
is alleged to occur; so that the prosecution proceeds wholely on [52] an 
allegation of bias, and in the baldest manner. The indictment runs against a 
bias; that is, all. But a bias is not actionable.
But I am not to be permitted to dispose of my defense in so easy a manner. The 
accusation of having endeavored to incite the poor to hatred of the rich is an 
accusation of such a kind that, apart from all question of punishment, it is 
likely to injure any citizen's name and fame. This accusation is of such 
character that, even if it is formally disproven on legal ground, it may still 
leave the accused an object of suspicion. You will, accordingly, Mr. President 
and Gentlemen of the Court, take it simply as evidence of the respect I bear you 
when I now go on to clear my honor in your sight, with the same solicitude as 
that with which I have defended my freedom. To this end it is necessary for me 
to present the grounds of fact, as painstakingly as I have presented the grounds 
of law, on which this accusation is to be quashed, and you will, therefore, I am 
sure, hear me with the same forbearance if this second part of my defense turns 
out to be but little briefer than the first.
I am accused of having violated Section 100 of the penal code. This section 
reads as follows: "Any person who endangers or jeopardizes the public peace by 
publicly inciting the subjects of the State to hatred or to contempt of one 
another, is liable to punishment by a fine of not less than 20 and not more than 
200 thalers, or by imprisonment of not less than one month and not more than two 
years."
This section of the law specifies three different con-[53]ditions, which must be 
found to concur if it is to be applicable.

I. There must be incitement 'to hatred or to contempt;
II. This incitement must be directed to the detriment of given classes of the 
subjects of the State, and I am accordingly accused by the public prosecutor of 
having incited the class of the unpropertied against the class of the 
propertied;
III. This incitement must be of such a nature as to endanger the public peace.
These three conditions must concur, must combine, if the section of the law is 
to apply, - and not one of these conditions occurs.

As to I. There must be incitement to hatred and contempt; there can in the case 
before you be no question of this point, and for several reasons.
1. The offense specified in Section 100 can not be committed except there be an 
intention to incite to hatred and contempt. A contingent incitement to hatred 
and contempt, an incitement by inadvertence, is in this case not conceivable. If 
such a contingent incitement, an unintended incitement to hatred and contempt, 
were conceivable, what would not the consequences be? We have, all of us, for 
instance, recently read certain speeches delivered in the upper house, which 
have, we will say, filled me, - and not me alone, Gentlemen, but along with me a 
very large part of the nation - with hatred and contempt to the point of 
distraction. Does it follow that the public prosecutor could take action against 
the speakers in question? He is not com-[54]petent to do so, even aside from the 
political prerogative of the speakers, for, although such has been the effect of 
these speeches, the purpose of these gentlemen was assuredly not to stir up 
hatred and contempt. But it is equally true that no one can deny that the 
purpose of my address was to impart knowledge. The most that the public 
prosecutor can allege is that it was a matter of indifference to me if the 
knowledge imparted stirred up hatred and contempt, - an allegation without 
significance, since there is no such thing as an incitement to hatred and 
contempt by inadvertence.
But, in point of fact, a deliberate i incitement of this kind is in the present 
case absolutely excluded for another reason, which at the same time establishes 
that the address in question could not even have had the effect of stirring up 
hatred and contempt. I, therefore, in order to prevent repetition, beg to 
present this reason in connection with the second, viz.: that my address could 
not have the effect of causing hatred and contempt.
I have, therefore, to say, as the second count under this head, that this 
address can not possibly have had the effect of stirring up hatred and contempt, 
and a fortiori can not have had that intention.
On what grounds alone can hatred and contempt be deserved?
On the ground of viciousness, which in turn is an attribute of voluntary human 
actions alone.
But in this address of mine, I show that the dominance of this principle of the 
bourgeoisie, against which I am by the public prosecutor accused of inciting to 
[55] hatred and contempt, is but a stage of economic and ethical development, 
which is the outcome of historical necessity, and that its non-existence is an 
utter impossibility and that it therefore has all the character of natural 
necessity that belongs to the developmental progress of the earth.
Do we hate Nature because we have to struggle with her? Because we have to 
strive to guide her processes and improve her products?
But there is the further question: How has the public prosecutor understood my 
pamphlet?

The fundamental idea of my address is that the domination of the bourgeoisie has 
in no wise been produced, consciously and by their own motion, intentionally and 
in a responsible manner, by the propertied class as persons or individuals. On 
the contrary, the bourgeois are but the unconscious, choiceless, and therefore 
irresponsible products, not the producers of the situation as it stands and as 
it has developed under the guidance of quite other laws than the direction of 
personal choice. Even their reluctance to surrender this their mastery I refer 
back to the laws of human nature, whose character it is to hold fast to whatever 
is and to account it necessary. But a doctrine which goes the length of denying 
the propertied class all responsibility for the existing state of things, which 
makes them a product instead of the producers of this state of things - this 
doctrine the public prosecutor construes to have incited to hatred and contempt 
of these persons.
For, be it noted, we have here to do with persons and [56] classes of persons, 
under section 100, not with institutions established by the State, as under 
section 101.
No workingman has got so faulty an understanding of my address as the public 
prosecutor, and I leave it to him to say whether this is due to his lack of 
understanding or to his lack of will to understand.
But, more than all this, I go on to show that the dominance of the idea of the 
bourgeoisie is a great historic move in the liberation of humanity; that it was 
a most potent moral and cultural advance; that in fact it was the historically 
indispensable prerequisite and transitional stage, through development out of 
which the idea of the working class was to emerge.
I therefore must be said to, reconcile the working class to the dominance of the 
bourgeoisie as an historical fact by showing the logical necessity of this 
dominance. I reconcile them to it, for a comprehension of the rationality of 
what restricts us is the fullest possible reconciliation to it.
And if I proceed, further, to show that the idea of the bourgeoisie is not the 
highest stage of the historical development, not the perfect flower of advancing 
improvement, but that beyond it lies yet a higher manifestation of the human 
spirit, and that this ulterior phase rests on the former as its base - does this 
mean that I incite to hatred and contempt of the former?
The working class might as well bate and despise themselves and all human 
nature, whether in their own or in their neighbors' persons, because it is the 
law of human nature to unfold step by step and to proceed to [57] each 
succeeding stage of development from the indispensable vantage ground of the 
phase preceding.
If I had any predilection for homiletical discourse, Gentlemen, I should be 
quite justified in saying that I have exhorted the working classes to, a filial 
piety toward the bourgeoisie, in that I have shown that the dominance of the 
bourgeoisie was the indispensable prerequisite and condition by transition out 
of which alone the idea of the working class could come forth. For even if the 
son, by grace of a freer and fuller education and a larger endowment of personal 
force, strives to place himself above the level on which his father stood, still 
he never forgets the source of his own blood and the author of his own being. 
How deep in the mud is it the intention to thrust the noblest of all the 
sciences in bringing this charge of criminal instigation against the doctrine 
that history is an unfolding evolution of reason and human liberty?
It was for long incomprehensible to me how the public prosecutor could use such 
words as instigation to hatred and contempt in this connection. In the end I 
have been able to explain this fact to myself only on this one supposition. The 
public prosecutor must have endeavored in reading this address, to put himself 
in the place of a working man and has then come to feel that be would in such a 
case be moved to hatred.
The public prosecutor, then, is sensible that he would hate.
Now, Gentlemen, I might say that this would be attributable to the peculiarity 
of his temperament, and that he had no call to generalize and go beyond that. 
But [58] I will lend a hand to the public prosecutor in this perplexity. I will 
bring the charge against myself in a more telling form than he has been able to 
do. I will formulate it as the facts of the case require that it must be 
formulated if it is to be preferred at all. And in so doing, the more pointedly 
I may be able to bring to light the essential nature of the charge, the more 
utterly shall I annihilate it.
This is what the public prosecutor should have said:
It is true this address held by Lassalle appeals to the intellect of the 
auditors, not to their practical impulses or their emotions. It is accordingly 
true also that this address does not come within the sphere of competence of the 
penal code.
But in a person endowed with the normal complement of human sensibility, 
cognition, will and emotion are not 'so many insulated pigeonholes which stand 
in no relation to one another. Whenever the one compartment is full it flows 
over into the next. Will and emotion are servants of the intellect and are 
controlled by it.
Lassalle, it is true, has not a word to say of hatred and contempt; he is simply 
occupied with a theoretical exposition of how certain arrangements, for 
instance, the three-class suffrage, is pernicious. I am unable to confute this 
teaching. But I have this to say with respect to the organic unity of human 
nature, that if the doctrine is true then it follows that every normally 
constituted working man must come to hate and distrust not only these 
arrangements and institutions but also those who profit by them.
Such is the logical framework on which this indict-[59]ment must proceed. This 
is the line of argument which, avowedly or not, by logical necessity comes to 
expression in this indictment.
It is not I, but the public prosecutor speaking from the eminence of his curule 
chair, who proclaims to the working classes the awful doctrine: You must hate 
and distrust.
It is not for me, it is for the public prosecutor to square himself with the 
bourgeoisie.
But what is my answer to the public prosecutor and his indictment which charges 
me with his own offense?
My answer is a four-fold one:
In the first place a full recognition of the inadequacy or the viciousness of a 
given institution must arouse in any person of normal sensibility an enduring 
purpose to change such an institution, if possible, and the arousing of such an 
undying purpose in my hearers has necessarily been the aim of my scientific 
investigation, as it necessarily is the end of all scientific work. But such a 
purpose, so long as it does not utter itself in an illegal manner, is absolutely 
unconstrained by law. The like is true of all effort to arouse such a purpose, 
so long as it does not resort to illegal means. But such a purpose to amend the 
shortcomings of any established arrangement, is by no means the same thing as 
hatred and contempt of the arrangement in question; since these shortcomings are 
a matter of historical growth, of historical necessity; since, indeed, they may 
even be, in effect, a factor in the work of liberation, and a factor of the 
gravest consequence and of the most beneficial effect for cultural growth. 
Further reasons to the like effect [60] have already been recited and I will not 
take up your time with their repetition and further development. Here, then, is 
the first hiatus in the public prosecutor's argument.
In the second place, if it actually follows in any given case that hatred and 
contempt is, for a normally constituted human being, the necessary consequence 
of a scientific knowledge of the facts, such hatred and contempt could by no 
means be laid under penalties by the legislator.
Whatever institution is so vicious that knowledge of it necessarily excites 
hatred and contempt, that institution should be hated and despised.
The legislator lays penalties upon such hatred and contempt as are but the 
effects produced by blind emotions and passions. But he has not imposed 
penalties upon human reason and the moral constitution of man. He consequently 
does not impose penalties upon hatred and contempt which are the necessary 
outcome of these two features of human nature. The public prosecutor construes 
section 100 to the effect that the legislator has therein intended to prohibit 
the use of reason and proscribe the moral nature of man. But such a purpose 'has 
not entered the thoughts of the law-giver. No court will put such a construction 
upon the law as to make the legislator the avowed enemy of intelligence and 
science, - and here come into bearing again all the arguments of my defense 
directed to Article 20 of the Constitution. The only meaning of these arguments 
in this connection is that even if science and its teaching were not by Article 
20 of the Constitution exempt from the [61] application of the criminal code, 
still section 100, except it be construed to, intend the utter destruction of 
human nature, can not be leveled against such hatred and contempt as is the 
necessary outcome of scientific knowledge.
In the third place, hatred and contempt of a given institutional arrangement or 
expedient is by no means the same thing as hatred and contempt of those persons 
who profit by the arrangement in question; whereas section 100 deals only with 
hatred of persons, - so that we have here the third break in the public 
prosecutor's argument, and it is a veritable saltomortale.
In the fourth place I have to present an argument of fact. The prosecutor's 
argument presents the most remarkable quid pro quo(*13) that has ever come to 
light in a legal discussion. The point which I here touch upon constitutes the 
transition to the second part of my argument, showing that all proof touching 
the second condition to be fulfilled by the indictment is wanting; viz.: that 
even if there were ground for speaking of hatred and contempt in this 
connection, it is still quite plain that there has been no instigation to hatred 
or contempt of those against whom I am charged with having incited to hatred and 
contempt.
As to this second part of the indictment: I am accused of instigating the 
unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the propertied classes.
"By this presentation," says the indictment, "working men will plainly be 
incited to hatred and contempt [62] of the bourgeoisie, that is to say, the 
unpropertied classes will be inflamed against the propertied classes." And after 
having in this way, quietly and by subreption, introduced this its definition of 
the term "Bourgeoisie," the indictment goes on to formulate its final charge as 
follows:

"It is accordingly charged that the, above named citizen, F. L., (1), by his 
lecture etc., and (2) by publishing the pamphlet containing this same lecture, 
has publicly instigated the unpropertied classes of the State's subjects to 
hatred and contempt of the propertied classes."

It is true, in my address I speak of the "bourgeoisie." But what is my 
definition of this term? It will be sufficient to cite a single passage which 
contains the definition of "bourgeoisie" as used by me in this pamphlet. This 
will show what an incomprehensible, unheard-of, uncharacterisable quid pro quo 
the public prosecutor has attempted to impute to me in charging me with 
instigating the unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the propertied 
classes.
On page 20 of this pamphlet is the following passage, quoted literally:

"I have now reached the point, Gentlemen, where it becomes necessary that, in 
order to avoid a possible gross misapprehension of what I have to say, I explain 
what I mean by the term 'bourgeoisie' or 'great bourgeoisie,' as the designation 
of a political party - that I define what the word 'bourgeoisie' means in my use 
of it.
[63] "The word 'bourgeoisie' might be translated into German by the term 
Bürgerthum (citizenship, or the body of citizens). But that is not the meaning 
actually attached to the word. We are all citizens - workingmen, petty burghers, 
commercial aristocracy and all the rest- alike. On the other band the word 
'bourgeoisie' has, in the course of historical development, come to designate a 
particular political bias and movement which I will now go on to characterize.
"At the time of the French Revolution, and, indeed, even yet, that entire body 
of subjects which is not of noble birth, was roughly divided into two sub-
classes: First the class comprising those persons who, wholly or chiefly, get 
their income from their own labor and are without capital, or are, at the most, 
possessed of but a moderate capital which affords them the means of carrying on 
some employment from which they and their families derive their subsistence. 
This class comprises the workingmen, the lower middle classes (Kleinbürger), the 
citizen class and also the body of the peasants. The second class is made up of 
those persons who have the disposal of a large property, of a large capital, and 
who are producers or receivers of income as the basis of their possession of 
capital. These latter might be called the great burghers or commoners, or the 
capitalist gentry. But such a great burgher or capitalist gentleman, is not by 
reason of that fact a bourgeois. No commoner has any objection to raise because 
a nobleman in the bosom of his [64] family finds comfort in his pedigree and in 
his lands. But when, on the other hand, this nobleman insists on making such 
pedigree or such landed property the basis of a peculiar importance and 
prerogative in the State, when he insists on making them a ground for 
controlling public policy, then the commoner takes offense at the nobleman and 
calls him a feudalist.
"The case is entirely similar as regards, the distinctions in respect of 
property within the body of commoners.
"That the capitalist gentleman in his chamber takes pleasure in the high degree 
of comfort and the great advantage which large wealth confers upon its 
possessor, - nothing can be more natural, simpler or more legitimate than that 
he should do so."

Incidentally, then, Gentlemen, so far am I in this pamphlet from instigating the 
unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the wealthy, that, on the 
contrary, I expressly declare myself for the legitimacy of such property. I 
explicitly declare that the satisfaction taken in the advantages and amenities 
which flow from such wealth are the most natural and legitimate things in the 
world.
Let me now go on with the definition referred to:

"The workingmen and the lower middle class, that is to say the class without 
capital, may be wholly justified in demanding that those by whose hands all that 
wealth which is the pride of our civilization is produced, whose hands have 
brought forth all these products without which society could not live for a 
single day – it may well be demanded that [65] these should be secured an ample 
and unfailing income, and thereby be given an opportunity for some intellectual 
development, and that they be by this means put in the way of a truly human 
manner of life. But, while I am free to say that the working classes are fairly 
within their rights in making these demands of the State, and to stand out 
stiffly for their demands as being the essential purpose for which the State 
exists, yet the workingman must never allow himself to forget that all property 
that has once been acquired and is legally held must be considered lawful and 
inviolable."

Such, then, is the manner and degree of my instigation of the unpropertied class 
to hatred and distrust that I incontinently preach to them the inviolability and 
sacredness of all property acquired by the wealthy classes, and exhort them to 
respect it.
But I go on to say:

"In case the man of means is not content with the material amenities of large 
wealth, but insists that possession of wealth, of capital, be made the basis of 
a control to be exercised over the State, a condition of participation in the 
direction of public policy and of the direction of public affairs, then and only 
then does the man of means become a bourgeois; then does be make the fact of 
property a legal ground of political power; then does he stand forth as 
representative of a privileged class aiming to put the imprint of its 
prerogative upon all social features and institutions, just as truly as [66] the 
nobility of the Middle Ages did with respect to the basis of their privilege, 
landed property."

Accordingly, in my use of the term, as I have explicitly and painstakingly 
defined it, the man of means, the man of the upper-middle class, is a bourgeois 
in case he proceeds to set up the essentially harmless and inoffensive fact of 
his large property as a legal condition of participation in the direction of 
public affairs; in short, when he proceeds to set up the ownership of capital as 
a legal and political prerogative, and so abolishes the equality of the 
propertied and the unpropertied classes before the law, and thereby infringes 
upon the liberty and further growth of the people, in the interest of 
accumulated wealth and continued upper-class mastery. Only under these 
circumstances, as I particularly point out, does the bourgeoisie become a 
privileged class, which it otherwise, in spite of all inequality of wealth, is 
not.
In my pamphlet I point out how all this has its effect through the census rating 
whereby admission to a share in the direction of public policy, through 
eligibility to any legislative body, is so limited by property qualifications as 
to make the possession of capital a prerequisite. I point out further that this 
effect follows equally whether the property qualification is open and aboveboard 
or underhand, and finally that the existing three-class system of elections, 
dating back to 1849, amounts to such an underhand, disguised property rating.
The point at which the pamphlet strikes, therefore, albeit in a purely 
theoretical way, is the three-class system of elections. It makes no attack upon 
the prop-[67]ertied classes, whose accumulated wealth, on the contrary, I am 
repeatedly at pains to define as wholly incontestable, inoffensive, inviolable 
and perfectly lawful.
This three-class system of elections is one of our political institutions.
Now, this being the case, why has not the public prosecutor indicted me under 
section 101 of the criminal code, "for having exposed the measures of the State 
to hatred and to contempt"? To be sure, if the prosecutor had chosen to make 
this charge, I should have known how to answer him. To go into this matter to-
day would be superfluous, for I am not accused of this offense, and my defense 
would be drawn out endlessly if I were to defend myself against charges that 
have never been brought against me.
But why, among all impossible charges, does the public prosecutor choose to 
bring precisely the most impossible? Why does he make this substitution as to 
the point of my attack? I point out that the three-class system of elections is 
an injustice because it makes an essentially innocent difference in wealth a 
legal qualification for participation in the direction of public affairs; 
whereupon this envenomed accusation is brought against me that I have instigated 
the unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the propertied.
Is there, then, no remedy, Gentlemen, against such a public defamation of one's 
name and fame?
Can we say that among us the introduction of the three-class system of elections 
is to be laid at the door of the propertied classes or the commonalty? Something 
of that kind might be said of the French bourgeoisie.
[68] In France the property qualification and rating was introduced as long ago 
as the revolutionary Assemblée Constituante. But the like has not been done by 
the German.
When the Prussian bourgeoisie came into power through the March revolution of 
1848 it introduced universal and equal suffrage by the law of the eighth of 
April 1818. The German bourgeoisie at St. Paul's Church, Frankfort, enacted 
universal equal suffrage.
The three-class system of elections which we now have, was arbitrarily imposed, 
imposed by the government.
Now, why does the public prosecutor shelter the government behind the backs of 
the Prussian bourgeoisie? A tout seigneur tout honneur!(*14)
It is the Prussian government, not the propertied classes, that must for all 
time and in the eyes of all people bear the responsibility of this arbitrarily 
imposed three-class system of elections.
But, whatever may have been the reasons which decided the public prosecutor to 
make this very singular substitution of grievances in his indictment - and we 
may perhaps presently come to find out what his reasons were - at any rate, this 
second ground of the indictment also fails. There has been no incitement against 
the propertied classes of the community; there has been no instigation against 
those against whom I am accused of instigating to hatred and contempt.
The third ground on which the indictment is brought, [69] the charge of having 
endangered the public peace, fails likewise.
As to this third count:

Section 100 says: "Any person who endangers the public peace by publicly 
inciting the subjects of the State to hatred or to contempt of one another is to 
be punished."

Now, when the State speaks of the public peace it can not be taken to mean peace 
of mind, for the State is not a pietistic overseer concerned about the subjects' 
peace of mind and the general sphere of spiritual edification. What it looks to 
is the peace of the streets. This is made quite plain by the phrase, "public 
peace."
The like is plain from all principles of law. Subjective states of mind do not 
concern the State; it is concerned with overt actions alone. It has accordingly, 
no concern with hatred and contempt or with instigation thereto in so far as 
they are a matter of subjective sensibility only; but such instigation is 
subject to penalties only in case it is of such a nature as to lead to overt 
action. This is very patently indicated by the legislator in making use of the 
expression, "Any person who endangers public peace." The legislator says not 
anyone who "disturbs," but anyone who "endangers." If, in the contemplation of 
the law, any incitement whatever to hatred and contempt were punishable; if, in 
the contemplation of the law, the public peace were to be "endangered" through 
the mere incitement to such subjective sentiments; then the law would 
necessarily have said: any person who disturbs the public peace by inciting. If 
such had been the phrasing of the law, then [70] it might perhaps be held that 
such disturbance always follows when instigation to hatred and contempt is made.
"Endanger" means to bring about the possibility of a disturbance, and by his 
choice of this term, therefore, the legislator has shown us that in speaking of 
the public peace be has not in mind a harmony of sentiments - which in the case 
contemplated must already have been disturbed, not simply endangered - but the 
peace of the streets. He has shown that he does not consider that a disturbance 
of the public peace necessarily has arisen in case of incitement to subjective 
sentiments of hatred and contempt. Consequently not every case of such 
incitement is held to be punishable, but only those cases in which the peace of 
the streets is in danger of being disturbed. In other words the penalty follows 
only when the incitement to hatred and contempt attains such a pitch as to 
become dangerous, that is to say, liable to result in overt unlawful acts. 
Section 100 is accordingly not to be taken to say that any person who incites to 
hatred and contempt endangers the public peace and is therefore subject to 
punishment. Such an interpretation would be wholly fallacious, on juridical as 
well as on grammatical grounds. Its meaning is that any person who puts the 
public peace in jeopardy through inciting to hatred and contempt - that is to 
say in case the incitement is of such a nature that it necessarily carries 
danger to the public peace - such a person is subject to the penalties of this 
law. In making use of the term "endanger," therefore, the law defines the crime 
of incitement to this effect, that it must be incitement of such a kind that it 
at least may [71] lead to, overt action - to the endangering of the peace of the 
streets - otherwise it is not punishable.
To show how far my action falls short of this third criterion, how little the 
alleged instigation is of the kind which might, even conceivably, lead to 
tangible action in the way of endangering the political peace, the peace of the 
public highways - to this end let me simply point out that in this address I am 
occupied with a discussion of periods of historical development of secular 
duration, and at the close I make the explicit statement that in the advance of 
a historical dawning one or two decades count but as a single hour in the 
revolution of a natural day.
So that we have here to do with an indictment which meets the requirements of 
the law at not a single point; whereas in order to an adequate charge, the 
several counts should concur, should combine and bear one another out.
It has frequently happened that indictments have been made in which some one 
count has not been well taken. But an indictment of which not even a single 
count proves to come within the contemplation of the law, - such an indictment 
deserves a special, and in every sense of the word a peculiar, place on honor in 
the temple of jurisprudence.
However, audiatur et altera pars.(*15) Let us take one last look at the 
motivation which the indictment offers. In so doing it is possible that we shall 
find that in what I have been saying I have, by some highly ingenious [72] 
artifice of exposition, succeeded in concealing the legally offensive features 
of my action; or on the other hand it may turn out that the totally nugatory 
character of this indictment will by this means be brought out in even more 
startling fashion than has yet appeared.
There is one sentence in this indictment which serves as underpinning to the 
whole structure. This sentence may, therefore, be expected to be of selected 
timber. The preamble of the document says: "The leading ideas of this address 
are as follows: -" and then, having given an ostensible resumé of these ideas, 
it goes on to the following effect: "By these expositions, and by the frequently 
recurring allusions to an imminent social revolution, the working men will 
manifestly be provoked to hatred and contempt of the bourgeoisie; that is to say 
the unpropertied classes will be stirred up against the propertied, whereby the 
public peace will be endangered, particularly since the address contains a 
direct appeal to make the mastery of the working class over the other classes of 
society the end of their endeavors, to be pursued with the most ardent and 
consuming passion."
This is the only passage in the document that is of the nature of a legal 
motivation. Let us look more closely into this sentence. This is a sentence 
which might give the asthma to a person with weak lungs, and it is so 
constructed as to hide its total lack of substance from any superficial view 
under a shimmering verbiage and a confusion of ideas. If you will look more 
closely into this passage, Gentlemen, you will be astonished at the quantity of 
juristic monstrosities, ab-[73]surdities, misstatements and misconstructions of 
fact which it contains.
Now, whereby, according to this passage, have I accomplished my alleged 
incitement to hatred and contempt? "By these expositions," says the document. 
That is to say by a purely theoretical, purely objective exposition of 
historical events; by what the indictment itself designates as the exposition of 
my leading ideas; by nothing else, therefore, than the scientific doctrine 
simply. It is by this means that I am alleged to have incited to hatred and 
contempt. The indictment may shift and turn as it likes; it can not escape the 
avowal that its accusation runs against nothing else than purely scientific 
arguments, - against science and its teaching.
But the passage goes on to add an "and." By these expositions and by the 
frequently recurring allusions to an imminent social revolution is the 
instigation alleged to have been effected.
What are these allusions to an imminent social revolution? Where are they to be 
found? Why does not the the public prosecutor cite them? I call upon him to do 
so. But he can not cite them. There is no passage in this pamphlet which will 
bear out his insinuations on this point.
It is true, throughout this pamphlet I make frequent use of the words 
"revolutionary" and "revolution"; although I do not speak of an "imminent social 
revolution," as the public prosecutor alleges. What I speak of is a social 
revolution which supervened in February 1848. But with this word, "revolution," 
the public prosecutor hopes to crush me. For he, taking the word in [74] its 
narrower legal sense alone, cannot read this word, "revolution," without 
conjuring up before his fancy the brandishing of pitchforks. But such is not the 
meaning of the word in its scientific use, and the consistent use of the term in 
my pamphlet might have apprised the public prosecutor of the fact that the term 
is there employed in its alternative, scientific signification. So, for 
instance, I speak of the development of the territorial principality as a 
"revolutionary" phenomenon.
And so again, on the other hand, I expressly declare, that the peasant wars, 
which, assuredly, were sufficiently garnished with violence and bloodshed, - I 
declare these wars to have been a movement which was revolutionary only in the 
imagination of those who participated in them, whereas they were in reality not 
a revolutionary, but a reactionary movement.
The progress of industry which took place in the sixteenth century, on the 
contrary, I repeatedly and constantly characterize as a "really and veritably 
revolutionary fact" (page 7), although no sword was drawn on its account. 
Likewise I characterize (page 7), the invention of the spinning jenny in 1775 as 
a radical and effectual revolution.
Is this an abuse of language, or am I hereby introducing a novel use of words in 
making use of the term "revolution" in this sense, - in that I apply it to 
peaceful developments and deny it to, sanguinary disturbances?
The elder Schelling says (Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen 
Freiheit Vol. VII, p. 351): "The happy thought of making freedom the all in all 
of Philosophy has not only made the human intellect free [75] as regards its own 
motives and effected a greater change in this science in all directions than any 
earlier revolution," etc, The elder Schelling, at least, does not, like the 
public prosecutor's fancy, see pitchforks flashing before his eyes at the sound 
of the word "revolution." Applying the word, as he does, to the effects wrought 
by a philosophical principle, he takes it, as I do, in a sense which has no 
relation whatever to physical violence.
What, then, is the scientific meaning of this word "revolution," and how does 
revolution differ from reform? Revolution means transmutation, and a revolution 
is, accordingly, accomplished whenever, by whatever means, with or without shock 
or violence, an entirely new principle is substituted for what is already in 
effect. A reform, on the other hand, is effected in case the existing situation 
is maintained in point of principle, but with a more humane, more consequent or 
juster working out of this principle. Here, again, it is not a question of the 
means. A reform may be effected by means of insurrection and bloodshed, and a 
revolution may be carried out in piping times of peace. The peasant wars were an 
attempt at compelling a reform by force of arms. The development of industry was 
a full-blown revolution, accomplished in the most peaceable manner; for in this 
latter case an entirely new and novel principle was put in the place of the 
previously existing state of affairs. Both these ideas are developed at length 
and with great pains in the pamphlet under consideration.
How comes it that the public prosecutor alone has failed to understand me? Why 
is all this unintelligible to him alone, when every workingman understands it?
[76] Now, even suppose that I had spoken of an "imminent social revolution," as 
in point of fact I did not; would L therefore, necessarily have been talking of 
pitchforks and bayonets?
Professor Huber is a thoroughly conservative man, a strenuous royalist, a man 
who, on the adoption of the constitution of 1850, voluntarily resigned the 
professor's chair which he held in the University of Berlin, because, if I am 
rightly informed, he had scruples about subscribing to it; but at the same time 
he is a man who is with the deepest affection devoted to the welfare of the 
working classes, who has given the most painstaking study to their development 
and has written most excellent works upon that subject, particularly upon the 
history of industrial corporations or labor organizations. After having shown 
that the labor organizations of England, France and Germany already have in hand 
a capital of fifty million thalers, Professor Huber says in this latest work 
(Concordia, p. 24):

"Under these circumstances and under the influences herein at work, and in view 
of the historical facts above indicated in outline, it is to be hoped that I 
need enter no disclaimer against Utopian daydreams of a universal millenium when 
I say that not only is a very substantial reform of the existing political 
conditions of the factory population practicable in such a measure as to bring 
about an elevation of their entire social and economic situation, but such a 
reform is to be looked for as in the natural course of things the assured 
outcome of the growth of labor organizations."

[77] Here we have a prediction of a thoroughgoing social transmutation spoken of 
as the assured outcome of the labor-organization movement working out its, 
effects simply within the lines of the peaceable and conventional course of 
things. But how if I, with all the stronger reason, had spoken of a prospective 
social change that might be expected to result from the combined force of the 
two factors, organized labor and universal suffrage?
But bow can I be held accountable for the public prosecutor's literary 
limitations? for his lack of acquaintance with what is going on all around us in 
modern times and what science has already accepted and made a matter of record? 
Am I the scientific whipping-boy of the public prosecutor? If that were the 
case, the punishment which it would be for you, Mr. President and Gentlemen of 
the Court, to mete out to me would be something stupendous.
But all that apart, how can an allusion to an imminent social revolution, even 
to a pitchfork revolution, constitute an instigation to hatred and contempt of 
the bourgeoisie? And this is, after all, what the public prosecutor must be held 
to, allege in the passage cited, and this in fact is what he does allege. Hatred 
and contempt can be aroused against any man only by his own acts and their 
publicity. But how can anything done by Peter excite the hatred and contempt of 
Paul? If any one were to tell us: "The workingmen are going to get up a social 
revolution," how could that remark arouse hatred and contempt of the 
bourgeoisie? The passage in question, then, shows itself to have been one that 
makes no sense, either in point of grammar or in [78] point of logic. It is not 
only untrue with a threefold untruth, but it is contradictory and meaningless. 
At least it is quite unintelligible to me.
I have as great difficulty in understanding the public prosecutor's language as 
he has in understanding mine. The Greeks were in the habit of calling anyone 
barbaros (a barbarian) who did not understand the current speech. So the public 
prosecutor and I are both barbarians, the one to the other.
But this passage in the indictment which I have been analyzing brings up a third 
point at which I am alleged to have been guilty of inciting to hatred and 
contempt of the bourgeoisie. This is introduced with the word "particularly." 
The exposition and the allusions above spoken of are alleged to have incited to 
hatred and contempt, "particularly because the address contains a direct appeal 
to make the mastery of the working classes over the other classes of society the 
end of their endeavors, to be pursued with the most ardent and consuming 
passion." Suppose that such were the case; an exhortation addressed to a given 
class of society to pursue the vain ambition of a mastery over the other classes 
would be worthy of all reprobation, but it would still he legally permissible 
unless it urged to criminal acts. Every class in society is at liberty to strive 
for the control of the State, so long as it does not seek to realize its end by 
unlawful means. No political purpose is punishable, the means employed alone 
are. Now, the character of this prosecution, as a prosecution directed against a 
political bias, appears plainly and should be manifest to everyone in every line 
of the indictment, in that it con-[79]stantly charges incitement to the seeking 
of certain ends; it never attempts to show that criminal means have been 
employed, or that I have, in my address, urged the employment of such means. But 
even if I had been guilty of urging the working classes to resort to criminal 
means for gaining control over the other classes of society, then I could only 
have been indicted under Article 61(*16), or some other Article of the criminal 
code, but never under Article 100, or as having offended against that article by 
an instigation of the workingmen to hatred and contempt; for such an exhortation 
addressed to the working classes to make themselves masters of the other classes 
of society must have incited the workingmen to political ambition, but by no 
means to hatred and contempt of any third party. This ambition on the part of 
the workingmen could, of course, not have been fathered upon the bourgeoisie; 
and since responsibility for it could not have been put upon them, hatred and 
contempt of them could not have been aroused by the fact of such an ambition. It 
therefore appears again that this passage is quite devoid of grammatical and 
logical content. But upon what ground has the public prosecutor read into my 
address an exhortation urging to the pursuit of "mastery on the part of the 
workingmen over the other classes of society?"

All that I have to say in my pamphlet bearing on this head is that it is the 
destiny of the historical epoch beginning with February, 1848, to install the 
ethical principle of the working classes as the dominant [80] principle of 
society, to make it the guiding principle of the State; the nature of this 
principle is expounded in my pamphlet, and I have already restated it in outline 
in the introductory part of my speech.
I repeatedly and explicitly express myself to the same effect. So I say (page 
31) that, as in 1789 the revolution was a revolution of the third estate, so in 
this later case it was a revolution of the fourth estate, "which now seeks to 
erect its principle into the dominant principle of society and to permeate all 
institutions with it." Or again (p. 32): "Whoever, therefore, appeals to the 
principle of the working class as the dominant principle of society"; and, 
further, on the same page: "We have now to examine, in three several bearings, 
this principle of the working class as the dominant principle of society." And 
(p. 33): "Perhaps the idea of making the principle of the lowest class of 
society the dominant, principle of the State and of society may seem to be, a 
dangerous idea." I, then, proceed to develop, from page 39 onward, the 
difference between the ethical and political principle of the bourgeoisie and 
the ethical and political principle of the working class, and conclude, on page 
42 with the words: "This, then, is it, Gentlemen, that is to be characterized as 
the political principle of the working class," etc.
And because I present an exalted ethical principle, the noblest ethical 
principle which my intelligence is capable of grasping, the noblest ethical 
principle yet achieved by political philosophy, because I proclaim this as 
destined to become the guiding principle of the present period of history; 
because of this and because I bring [81] evidence to show that this principle, 
as being the expression of the natural instinct due to the economic situation of 
the working classes, is properly to be designated as the principle of the 
working classes, - this is what the public prosecutor has construed into an 
atrocious crime, and has accused me of urging the working classes to aim at 
making their own class the masters of the other classes of society.
The public prosecutor appears to believe that I aspire to see the propertied 
classes reduced to servitude under the working classes, that I would invert 
history and make the landed gentry and the manufacturers the servants of the 
workingmen.
But however widely we may differ, in the use of language, however much we may 
mutually be barbarians to one another, could such a misapprehension, or anything 
approaching it, be at all possible?
I develop (p. 32) my view, explicitly and in detail, to the effect that this is 
precisely the characteristic mark of the fourth estate, that its principle 
contains no ground of discrimination, whether in point of fact or in point of 
law, such as could be erected into a domineering prerogative and applied to 
reconstruct the institutions of society to that end. The words I use are as 
follows (p. 32): Laborers we all are, in so far as we are willing to make 
ourselves useful to human society in any way whatever. This fourth estate, in 
the recesses of whose heart there lies no germ of a new and further development 
of privilege, is therefore a term coincident with the human race. Its concerns 
are, therefore, in truth the concerns of mankind as a whole; its freedom is the 
[82] freedom of mankind itself; its sovereignty is the sovereignty of all men." 
And I thereupon go on to say: "Therefore, whoever appeals to the principle of 
the working class as the dominant principle of society, in the sense in which I 
have presented this idea, - his cry is not a cry designed to divide the classes 
of society," etc. And while I, with all my heart and soul, am making an appeal 
for the termination of all class rule and all class antagonism, the public 
prosecutor charges me with inciting the laborers to establish class rule over 
the propertied classes.
I ask again: How is such an astonishing misunderstanding to be explained? Permit 
me once again to quote the father against the son:

"The medium," says Schelling (Vol. I, p. 243, Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des 
Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre) - "The medium whereby intellects understand 
one another is not the circumambient atmosphere, but the joint and common 
freedom whose movements penetrate to the innermost recesses of the soul. A human 
spirit not consciously replete with freedom is excluded from all spiritual 
communion, not only with others but even with himself. No wonder, therefore, 
that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others, and wearies 
himself in his pitiable solitude with empty words which stir no friendly 
response whether in his own or in another's breast. To be unintelligible to such 
an unfortunate is a credit and an honor before God and man."

So says Schelling, the father.
[83] Gentlemen, I have now reached the close of my argument. It were bootless to 
ask whether this charge could possibly have any weight with you, Mr. President 
and Gentlemen of the Court. But there was probably another design at the root of 
the prosecution. The political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the 
government has lately shown some slight signs of life. It has, not improbably, 
been thought that under these circumstances a prosecution for incitement of the 
unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the propertied classes would 
create an effective diversion; it was probably hoped that even if such an 
accusation were dismissed by you, will you remember the ancient adage: 
calumniare audacter, semper aliquit haeret(*17) - it would serve as a wet towel 
to bind about the slightly inflamed countenance of our bourgeoisie, - and so, 
with this in view, Gentlemen, I was selected as the scapegoat to be driven out 
into the wilderness. But even this design, Gentlemen, will fail.
It will fail shamefully through the mere reading of my pamphlet, which I most 
particularly commend to the bourgeoisie. It will fail before the force of my own 
voice; and precisely with this in view I felt called on to go so extensively 
into the facts of the case in my defense. We are all, bourgeoisie and laborers, 
members of one people, and we stand firmly together against our oppressors.
Let me now close. Upon a man who, as I have presented the matter to you, has 
devoted his life under the motto, "Science and the Workingmen," even a sentence 
[84] which may meet him on the way will make no other impression beyond that 
made upon a chemist by the breaking of a retort used by him in his scientific 
experiments. With a momentary knitting of the brow and a reflection on the 
physical properties of matter, as soon as the accident is remedied he goes on 
with his experiments and his investigation as before.
But I appeal to you that for the sake of the nation and its honor, for the sake 
of science and its dignity, for the sake of the country and its liberty under 
the law, for the sake of your own memory as history shall preserve it,(*18) Mr. 
President and Gentlemen of the Court, acquit me.

NOTES:
(The original notes occur at the corresponding page)
1) The criteria which are here appealed to as working the differences of 
spiritual constitution between the so-called Germanic peoples and the peoples of 
antiquity are to-day questioned at more than one point. And quite legitimately 
so. Considered as peoples simply, the Greeks or Romans were scarcely less 
capable of development than the Germanic peoples. That their States, their 
political organizations, collapsed because of the decay of certain institutional 
arrangements peculiar to the social life of the times, that is a fortune in 
which the states of antiquity quite impartially have shared with the various 
States of the Germanic world. Political structures in general are capable of but 
a moderate degree of development. If the development proceeds beyond this 
critical point the result, sooner or later, is a historical cataclysm, whereby 
the old State is supplanted by a new form of social organization resting on a 
new foundation. As elements in this new foundation there may be comprised new 
religious or new ethical notions, but, in a general way, it is to be said that, 
except in the theocratic States, the role played by religion is only of 
secondary Importance even antiquity.
Socrates was not the first nor the only one in Greece who had taught "new gods." 
That he in particular was called on to drink the hemlock was due to reasons of 
State policy, which had but a very slight and unessential relation to the acts 
of sacrilege of which he was accused. It may be added that this Greek 
promulgator of new gods is among the German peoples fairly matched by John Huss 
and thousands of other victims of religious persecution.
Lassalle's mistake lies in this, that he seeks the motor force of development in 
the "spirit" of the nations, instead of looking for an explanation of their 
spiritual life in the peculiar circumstances which condition their development. 
But, in spite of this, It must be said that his conclusions as bearing upon the 
modern situation are for the most part substantially sound. [Editor.]
2) According to this doctrine, the motions of the "Monads" - animistically 
conceived units of which the entire universe, organic or inorganic; was held to 
be constituted - were (by the flat of God at the creation of the world) bound in 
a preordained sequence, in such a manner that all these motions constitute a 
comprehensive, harmonious series. Wherefore, all events whatever that may take 
place, take place as the necessary outcome of the constitution of these monads 
moving independently of one another.
3) Permission to teach.
4) I have fought not without glory.
5)In order to avoid a repetition of what has already been said, it may be 
briefly remarked that to-day this whole view of the nature of the state to seen 
to be, not something learned from past history, but something read into the 
history of the past. - [Editor.]
6) Don't disturb my circles.
7) Obgleich sich der Angeklagte Lassalle bei diesem Vortrage den Schein der 
Wissenschaftlichkeit gegeben hat, so hat derselbe doch - eine durch und durch 
praktische Tendenz."
8) Philosophie der Offenbarung, Vol. III., p. 11.
9) Gesammte Werke, Vol. VII., p. 394.
10) A new and unheard-of crime.
11) Ges. Werke, Vol. VII., p. 278.
12) In case it becomes necessary.
13) Confusion of one thing with another.
14) Honor to whom honor belongs!
15) Hear also the other side.
16) That is, for high treason.
17) Calumniate boldly, some of it will always stick.
18) Had the judges been able to realize with what force these words would come 
true, their verdict had no doubt been quite different from what it actually was. 
Still, our thanks are due to history for having preserved the name of Lassalle 
and with it the account of one of those occurrences which have contributed much 
to make the impartiality of the Prussian courts a byword of infamy with so many. 
[Editor.]
--- The End ---