en 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 detrimental, 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 attempt, since the
adoption of the constitution, to bring an indictment against any given
scientific teaching.

Gentlemen, since 1848--since 1830--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 today, we have been spared this one
indignity, of bein