“ Moscow, June 8th.
This city is really, for a city, the most beautiful and original that there is; the environs are pleasant, not pretty, not unsightly; but the view from above out of the Kremlin, over this circle of houses with green roofs, gardens, churches, towers of the most extraordinary shape and color, most of them green or red or light blue, generally crowned on top by a colossal golden bulb, usually five or more on one church, and surely one thousand towers! Anything more strangely beautiful than all this, lighted by slanting sunset rays, cannot be seen. ”

“ Clouds and mists collect and oppose the morning red, veiling its beams for a moment; but no power on earth can prevail against the slow and majestic rising of the sun which, an hour later, visible to all the world, radiating light and warmth, stands bright in the firmament. What an hour is, in the natural phenomena of every day, a decade or two is in the still more impressive spectacle of a sunrise in the world's history. ”

“ Absence of constraint in scientific inquiry and religious conduct is indeed the very palladium of German freedom. Nowhere is higher education so entirely removed from class distinction as in the country where the imperial princes are sent to the same school with the sons of tradesmen and artisans. Nowhere is there so little religious formalism, coupled with such deep religious feeling, as in the country where sermons are preached to empty benches, while Tannhauser and Lohengrin, Wallenstein and Faust, are listened to with the hush of awe and bated breath by thousands upon thousands. ”

“ If in the case of some one individual I ask myself what reason he can have, in his own mind, for continuing to live, to toil, to fret, to intrigue, and to spy—verily I do not know. Do not conclude from this scribbling that I happen to be in a particularly black mood; on the contrary, I feel as when, on a beautiful September day, one contemplates the yellowing foliage; healthy and gay, but a little sadness, a little homesickness, a longing for woods, lake, meadow, you and the children, all mingled with the sunset and a Beethoven symphony. ”

“ As long as life lasts and I am master of my senses, I must bring forth what is in me. What would life be if all men in the world were like you?" These words might have been spoken by Bismarck. Every word, every act of his public career, gives us the impression of a man irresistibly driven on by some overwhelming, mysterious power. He was not an ambitious schemer, like Beaconsfield or Napoleon; he was not a moral enthusiast like Gladstone or Cavour. If he had consulted his private tastes and inclinations, he would never have wielded the destinies of an empire. ”

“ Whoever obstructs scientific inquiry clamps down the safety valve of public opinion, and puts the State in train for an explosion. He prohibits science from finding out the malady and its remedy, and he thereby 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. ”

“ Just for this reason it is the business and the duty of the State to make it possible for you to take in hand the great cause of the free, individual association of the working class in such a way as to help its development, and make it its solemn duty to offer you the means and the opportunity for this association.
Now, do not allow yourselves to be deceived and misled by the cry of those who will tell you that any such intervention by the State destroys social incentive. It is not true that I hinder anybody from climbing a tower by his own strength if I hand him a ladder or a rope. ”

“ Nothing is more effective in impressing upon a class a dignified and deeply moral stamp than the consciousness that it is destined to be the ruling class; that it is called upon to elevate the principle of its class to the principle of the whole historical period; to make its idea the leading truth of the whole of society, and so, in turn, to shape society into a reflection of its own character. The lofty historical honor of this destiny must lay hold upon all your thoughts. ”

“ I was truly filled with gratitude to God, and there arose before my soul the quiet happiness of a family life filled with love, a peaceful haven, into which a gust of wind perchance forces its way from the storms of the world-ocean and ruffles the surface, but its warm depths remain clear and still so long as the cross of the Lord is reflected in them. ”

“ I was firmly convinced that God has denied to man the possibility of true knowledge; that it is presumption to claim to understand the will and plans of the Lord of the World; that the individual must await in submission the judgment that his Creator will pass upon him in death, and that the will of God becomes known to us on earth solely through conscience, which He has given us as a special organ for feeling our way through the gloom of the world. That I found no peace in these views I need not say. ”

“ I am thinking especially of the citizens of Berlin. If today you ask the opinion of your forty-eight million fellow-countrymen, and compare their views and those of the bulk of the German army with the bugbear which had found lodging in German hearts at the time of Platen's Polish songs, you surely cannot despair of further development. We may, you must agree, register progress, although it is slow and there are lapses. It is like climbing a sandy hill or walking in the lava of Mount Vesuvius. One often glides back, but on the whole one is advancing. ”

“ Not only all the great men of German thought, from Luther down to the Grimms and the Humboldts, have been conspicuous for their freedom from artificial conventions and for the originality and homeliness of their human intercourse; but even the average German official—wedded as he may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public status—is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured, unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he has left the cares of his office behind him. ”

“ The German Union has been destroyed by us, because the existence which we were granted within it was unbearable in the long run for ourselves and the German people as well. After the dissolution of the German Union and the war of 1866, Prussia, as it was then, or North Germany, would have become isolated, if we had been obliged to count with the fact that nobody would be willing to pardon our new successes—the great successes which we had won. No great power looks with favor on the successes of its neighbors. ”

“ To say that a man who is willing to take such responsibilities as these makes himself thereby an offender against morality appears to me tantamount to condemning the Alps as obstructions to traffic. A people, at any rate, that glories in the achievements of a Luther has no right to cast a slur upon the motives of a Bismarck.
Whatever one may think of the worth of the cause for which Bismarck battled all his life—the unity and greatness of Germany—it is impossible not to admire the policy of moderation and self-restraint pursued by him after every one of his most decisive victories. ”

“ In Germany struggles have existed always, and the party schisms of today are naught but the echoes of the old German struggle between the noble families and the trade unions in the cities, and between those who had and those who had not in the peasant wars, in the religious wars, and in the thirty years' war. None of these far reaching fissures, which I am tempted to call geological, can disappear at once. And should we not be indulgent with our opponents, if we ourselves do not desist from fighting? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Here the children of the desert congregate and, pushing their bamboo-spears into the sand—point down, squat on the ground to admire the glory of a city—even though it be a city which affects the European with the very opposite of glory, but which for hundreds of miles has no equal.
Perhaps no people have preserved their character, customs, morals, and speech as unchanged through centuries as the Arabs, and have done so in spite of the most manifold changes in the world at large. ”

“ The whole business, moreover, while very honorable, is scarcely pleasurable. Is any one obliged to submit to such public, sharp and impolite criticisms as a German minister? Is it true of anyone but him that the behavior customary among people of culture does not prevail when he addressed? Without the least scruple one says things to him publicly which one would be ashamed to say to him privately, if one were to meet him in a drawing-room, for instance. I should not say this here if the Reichstag did not hold an exceptional position in Germany in these matters as well as in everything else. ”

“ As long as the people of Alsace and Lorraine were French, Paris with its splendor and the grandeur of a united France stood behind them; they could meet their fellow Germans with the consciousness that Paris was theirs, and thus find a reason for their sense of exclusive superiority. I do not wish to discuss further the reasons why everyone attaches himself more readily to a big political system which gives scope to his abilities, than to a divided, albeit related, nation, such as existed formerly on this side of the Rhine, in so far as the Alsatians were concerned. ”

“ Luther, the fearless champion of religious individualism, was, in questions of government, the most pronounced advocate of paternalism. Kant, the cool dissector of the human intellect, was at the same time the most rigid upholder of corporate morality. It was Fichte, the ecstatic proclaimer of the glory of the individual will, who wrote this dithyramb on the necessity of the constant surrender of private interests to the common welfare: "Nothing can live by itself or for itself; everything lives in the whole; and the whole continually sacrifices itself to itself in order to live anew. ”

“ I am, therefore, of the opinion that a State which is at war with the infernal elements recently described to you here in detail, and which possesses among its citizens an overwhelming majority of sincere adherents of the Christian religion, should do for the poor, the weak, and the old much more than this bill demands—as much as I hope to be able to ask of you next year. And such a State, especially when it wishes to demonstrate its practical Christianity, should not refuse our demands, for its own sake and for the sake of the poor! ”

“ You shall at least have the conviction, so far as human purpose can give it, that I shall wander, together with Johanna, with the strong staff of the Word of God, trough this dead and wicked activity of the world, whose nakedness will become more apparent to us in our new position than before, and that to the end of our joint pilgrimage my hand shall strive, in faithful love, to smooth Johanna's paths, and to be a warm covering to her against the breath of the great world. ”

“ The bourgeoisie, scared 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 reëstablishment of the police power and quaking with a fright which they have not yet forgotten, the recollection of which still leaves them incapable of taking up the political struggle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Certainly it can, but only by its application and extension to the field of factory production. To make the working class their own employers—that is the means, the only means, by which, as you can see for yourself, this inexorable and cruel law which determines wages can be abolished. When the working class is its own employer, the distinction between wages and profits will disappear, and the total yield of the industry will take the place, as the reward of labor, of the bare living wage. ”