[Rheinische Zeitung No. 125, May 5, 1842, Supplement] 

To the amazement of all writing and reading Germany the 
Preussische Staats-Zeitung one fine Berlin spring morning published 
its self-confession.*© Of course, it chose an elegant, diplomatic, not 
exactly amusing, form for its confession. It gave itself the appear- 
ance of wanting to hold up the mirror for its sisters to recog- 
nise themselves; it spoke mysteriously only about other Prussian 
newspapers, while it was really speaking about the Prussian news- 
paper par excellence, itself. 

This fact allows of many different explanations. Caesar spoke 
about himself in thethird person. Why should the Preussische Staats- 
Zeitung, in speaking about third persons, not mean itself? Children, 
when speaking about themselves, are in the habit of saying not 
“I”, but “George”, etc. Why should not the Preussische Staats- 
Zeitung be allowed to use for its “I” the Vossische,*’ Spenersche,* 
or some other saint’s name? 

The new censorship instruction had appeared. Our newspapers 
believed they had to adopt the outward appearance and conven- 
tional forms of freedom. The Preussische Staats-Zeitung, too, was 
compelled to awake and have some kind of liberal—or at least in- 
dependent — ideas. 

The first essential condition for freedom, however, 1s self-knowl- 
edge, and self-knowledge is an impossibility without self-confes- 
sion. 

Hence one should firmly keep in mind that the Preussische 
Staats-Zeitung has written self-confessions; one should never forget 
that we see here the first awakening to self-consciousness of a semi- 
official press-child, and then all riddles will be solved. One will 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 133 

be convinced that the Preussische Staats-Zeitung “utters with compo- 
sure many a great word”, and will only remain undecided whether 
one should admire more the composure of its greatness or the 
greatness of its composure. 

Hardly had the censorship instruction appeared, hardly had the 
Staats-Zeitung recovered from this blow, before it came out with the 
question: “What use has the greater freedom fromcensorship been 
to you Prussian newspapers?” 

Obviously, what it means to say by this is: What use have the 
many years of strict observance of the censorship been to me? 
What have I become, in spite of the most scrupulous and thor- 
oughgoing supervision and tutelage? And what should now 
become of me? I have not learnt to walk and a sensation-loving 
public is expecting entrechats from one who has a dislocated hip- 
joint! So will it be for you, too, my sisters! Let us confess our 
weaknesses to the Prussian people, but let us be diplomatic in our 
confession. We shall not tell them outright that we are uninterest- 
ing. We shall tell them that if the Prussian newspapers are 
uninteresting for the Prussian people, the Prussian state is uninter- 
esting for the newspapers. 

The bold question of the Staats-Zeitung and the still bolder 
answer are mere preludes to its awakening, dream-like allusions in 
the text to the role that it will perform. It is awakening to 
consciousness, it is speaking its mind. Listen to Epimenides! 

It is well known that the first theoretical activity of the mind 
that still wavers between sensuous perception and thinking is 
counting. Counting is the first free theoretical mental act of the 
child. Let us count, the Preussische Staats-Zeitung calls to its sisters. 
Statistics is the premier political science! I know a man’s head 
when I know how many hairs grow on it. 

Do as you would be done by. And how could one better 
appreciate us and especially me, the Preussische Staats-Zeitung, than 
statistically! Statistics will not merely prove that I appear as often 
as any French or English newspaper, but also that I am less read 
than any newspaper in the civilised world. Discount the officials 
who half-heartedly have to be interested in me, subtract the public 
places which must have a semi-official organ, and who reads me, I 
ask, who? Calculate what I cost; calculate the income I receive, and 
you will admit that it is not a profitable business to utter great 
words with composure. See how cogent statistics are, how counting 
makes more far-reaching mental operations superfluous! There- 
fore count! Numerical tables instruct the public without exciting 
their emotions. 

And the Staats-Zeitung with the importance it attaches to 
statistics not only puts itself on a par with the Chinese and with 
the universal statistician Pythagoras*! It shows that it has been 
influenced by the great natural philosopher of recent times*, who 
wanted to represent the differences between animals, etc., by a 
series of numbers. 

Thus the Preussische Staats-Zeitung is not without modern philo- 
sophical foundations, in spite of its apparent positivism.” 

The Staats-Zeitung is many-sided. It does not stop at number, 
temporal magnitude. It carries the recognition of the quantitative 
principle further and proclaims the justification of spatial mag- 
nitude. Space is the first thing whose magnitude impresses the 
child. It is the first magnitude which the child encounters in the 
world. Hence the child holds a big man to be a great man, and in 
the same childish way the Staats-Zeitung informs us that thick books 
are incomparably better than thin ones, and much more so than 
single leaflets or newspapers, which produce only one printed sheet 
daily. 

You Germans can only express yourselves at great length! Write 
really voluminous books on the organisation of the state, books of 
solid learning, which no one reads except the Herr Author and 
the Herr Reviewer, but bear in mind that your newspapers are not 
books. Think how many printed sheets go to make a solid work of 
three volumes! Therefore do not seek the spirit of our day or time 
in newspapers, which offer you statistical tables, but seek it in 
books, whose size guarantees their solidity. 

Bear in mind, you good children, that it is a matter here of 
“learned” things. Study in the school of thick books and you will 
quickly get to love us newspapers on account of our flimsy format, 
our gentlemanly lightness, which is truly refreshing after the thick 
books. 

Of course! Of course! Our time has no longer that real taste for 
size that we admire in the Middle Ages. Look at our paltry little 
pietistic tracts, look at our philosophical systems in small octavo, 
and then cast your eyes on the twenty gigantic folios of Duns 
Scotus. You do not need to read the books; their exciting aspect 
suffices to touch your heart and strike your senses, something like 
a Gothic cathedral. These primitive gigantic works materially 
affect the mind; it feels oppressed under their mass, and the 
feeling of oppression is the beginning of awe. You do not master 
the books, they master you. You are an unimportant appendage to 

* Lorenz Oken.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 135 

them, and in the same way, in the view of the Preussische 
Staats-Zeitung, the people should be an unimportant appendage of 
their political literature. 

Thus the Staats-Zeitung, although its language is quite modern, 
is not without historical foundations belonging to the sterling pe- 
riod of the Middle Ages. 

If, however, the theoretical thinking of the child is quantitative, 
its judgment, like its practical thought, is primarily practical and 
sensuous. The sensuous quality of the child is the first link that 
connects it with the world. The practical organs of senses, primarily 
the nose and mouth, are the first organs by means of which it 
judges the world. Hence the childish Preussische Staats-Zeitung 
judges the value of newspapers, and therefore its own value, by 
means of its nose. If a Greek thinker’ held that dry souls were the 
best, *’ the Staats-Zeitung holds that “pleasant-smelling’ newspapers 
are “good’ newspapers. It cannot praise too highly the “lzterary 
fragrance” of the Augsburg Allgemeine and the Journal des Débats. 
Rare, praiseworthy naivety! Great Pompey, greatest of all! 

After allowing us, therefore, a deep insight into the state of its 
soul by means of a number of separate praiseworthy utterances, 
the Staats-Zeitung sums up its view of the state in a profound 
reflection, the crux of which is the great discovery: 

“that in Prussia the state administration and the whole organisation of the state 

are remote from the political spirit, and therefore cannot be of political interest 
either to the people or to the newspapers”. 

In the opinion of the Preussische Staats-Zeitung, therefore, in 
Prussia the state administration has no political spirit, or the 
political spirit has no state administration. How crude of the 
Staats-Zeitung to assert what the bitterest opponent could not 
express more brutally, namely, that the real life of the state is 
without any political spirit, and that the political spirit does not 
live in the real state! 

But we ought not to forget the childish-sensuous standpoint of the 
Preussische Staats-Zeitung. It tells us that in regard to railways one 
should think only of rails and ways, in regard to trade contracts 
only of sugar and coffee, and in regard to leather factories only of 
leather. The child, of course, does not go beyond sensuous 
perception, it sees a thing only in isolation, and the invisible nerve 
threads which link the particular with the universal, which in the 
state as everywhere make the material parts into soul-possessing 
members of the spiritual whole, are for the child non-existent. 

* Heraclitus.— Ed. 

The child believes that the sun revolves around the earth; that the 
universal revolves around the particular. Hence the child does not 
believe in the spirit, but it believes in spectres. 

Thus the Preussische Staats-Zeitung regards the political spirit as 
a French spectre; and it thinks it exorcises the spectre if it throws 
leather, sugar, bayonets and numbers at it. 

However, our reader will interrupt us, we wanted to discuss the 
“Rhine Province Assembly proceedings” and instead we are being 
presented with the “innocent angel”, that senile child of the press, 
the Preussische Staats-Zeitung, and a repetition of the old-time lulla- 
bies with which it again and again tries to lull itself and its sisters 
into wholesome hibernation. 

But does not Schiller say: 

“But what the sage’s reason fails to see 

A childish nature grasps in all simplicity.” ? 

The Preussische Staats-Zeitung “in all simplicity” has reminded us 
that we in Prussia, no less than in England, have assemblies of the 
estates, whose proceedings the daily press would indeed be allowed 
to discuss, if it could; for the Staats-Zeitung in its great, classical 
self-consciousness takes the view that what the Prussian newspa- 
pers lack is not permission but ability. We concede it the latter 
as its special privilege, while at the same time, without further ex- 
planation of its ability, we take the liberty of actually implement- 
ing the idea it had in all simplicity. 

The publication of the Assembly proceedings will only become a 
reality when they are treated as “public facts”, i.e., as subject-matter 
for the press. The last Rhine Province Assembly is the one with 
which we are most immediately concerned. 

We begin with its “Debates on Freedom of the Press” and must 
remark as a preliminary that, while we sometimes give our own 
positive view of this question as a participant, in later articles we 
shall follow and present the course of the proceedings more as a 
historical spectator. 

The nature of the proceedings themselves determines this 
difference in the method of presentation. For in all the other 
debates we find that the various opinions of the Assembly repre- 
sentatives are on about the same level. In the question of the press, 
on the other hand, the opponents of a free press have a consider- 
able advantage. Apart from the catchwords and commonplaces 
which fill the air, we find among these opponents of press freedom 

4 F. Schiller, Die Worte des Glaubens.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 137 

a pathological emotion, a passionate partisanship, which gives them 
a real, not an imaginary, attitude to the press, whereas the defend- 
ers of the press in this Assembly have on the whole no real rela- 
tion to what they are defending. They have never come to know 
freedom of the press as a vital need. For them it is a matter of the 
head, in which the heart plays no part. For them it is an “exotic” 
plant, to which they are attached by mere “sentiment”. Hence 
it happens that all too general, vague arguments are put forward 
to counter the especially “weighty” grounds of the opponents, and 
the most narrow-minded idea is held to be important as long as 
it is not demolished. 

Goethe once said that the painter succeeds only with a type of 
feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being. * 
Freedom of the press, too, has its beauty—if not exactly a 
feminine one — which one must have loved to be able to defend it. 
If I truly love something, I feel that its existence is essential, that it 
is something which I need, without which my nature can have no 
full, satisfied, complete existence. The above-mentioned defenders 
of freedom of the press seem to enjoy a complete existence even 
in the absence of any freedom of the press. 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 128, May 8, 1842, Supplement] 

The liberal opposition shows us the level of a political assembly, 
just as the opposition in general shows the level of development 
that a society has reached. A time in which it 1s philosophical 
audacity to doubt the existence of ghosts, in which it is regarded 
as a paradox to oppose witch trials, is the time in which ghosts and 
witch trials are legitimate. A country which, like ancient Athens, 
regards lickspittles, parasites and flatterers as exceptions to the 
good sense of the people, as fools among the people, is a country of 
independence and self-reliance. But a people which, like all 
peoples of the good old times, claims the right to think and utter 
the truth only for court-jesters, can only be a people without 
independence or personality. An assembly of the estates in which 
the opposition assures us that freedom of the will is inherent in 
human nature, is at least not an assembly in which freedom of the 
will prevails. The exception proves the rule. The liberal opposition 
shows us what the liberal position has become, to what extent 
freedom is embodied in man. 

Therefore, if we have remarked that the defenders of freedom 
of the press in the Assembly of the Estates are by no means equal 

* J. Goethe, Verschiedenes tiber Kunst. Kapitel 2.— Ed. 

to their task, this applies still more to the Provincial Assembly as a 
whole. 

Nevertheless, we begin our account of the Assembly proceedings 
at this point, not merely out of a special interest in freedom of the 
press, but equally out of a general interest in the Assembly. For we 
find the specific estate spirit nowhere more clearly, decisively and 
fully expressed than in the debates on the press. This holds good 
especially of the opposition to freedom of the press, just as in general it 
is in Opposition to a general freedom that the spirit of a definite 
sphere in society, the individual interest of a particular estate and 
its natural one-sidedness of character are expressed most bluntly 
and recklessly and, as it were, show their teeth. 

The debates provide us with a polemic of the princely social 
estate against freedom of the press, a polemic of the knightly estate, 
and a polemic of the urban estate, so that it is not the individ- 
ual, but the social estate that conducts the polemic. What mirror, 
therefore, could reflect the inner nature of the Assembly better 
than the debates on the press? 

We begin with the opponents of a ‘free press, and, as is only fair, 
with a speaker from the princely estate. 

We shall not deal with the content of the first part of his speech, 
to the effect “that freedom of the press and censorship are both 
evils, etc.”, for this theme is more thoroughly expounded by another 
speaker. But we must not pass over his characteristic method of 
argument. | 

“Censorship,” he said, “is a lesser evil than excesses on the part of the press.” 
“This conviction has gradually so taken root in our Germany” (the question is: which 

part of Germany that is) “that the Federation, too, issued laws on the subject, which 
Prussia joined in approving and observing.” 

The Assembly discusses liberation of the press from its bonds. 
These bonds themselves, proclaims the speaker, the fetters with 
which the press is shackled, prove that it is not destined for free 
activity. Its fettered existence testifies against its essential nature. 
The laws against freedom of the press are a refutation of freedom 
of the press. 

This is a diplomatic argument against all reform, one which most 
decisively expresses the classical theory of a certain party. Every 
restriction of freedom is a factual, irrefutable proof that at one 
time those who held power were convinced that freedom must be 
restricted, and this conviction then serves as a guiding principle 
for later views. 

People were once ordered to believe that the earth did not go 
round the sun. Was Galileo refuted by this? 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 139 

Similarly, in our Germany legal sanction was given to the 
conviction of the empire, which the individual princes shared, that 
serfdom was a quality inherent in certain human beings, that truth 
could be made most evident by surgical operation, we mean 
torture, and that the flames of hell could already be demonstrated 
to heretics by means of flames on earth. 

Was not legal serfdom a factual proof against the rationalist fan- 
tasy that the human body was no object for handling and posses- 
sion? Did not the primitive method of torture refute the false 
theory that truth could not be extracted by opening veins, that 
stretching limbs on the rack did not break down the victim’s silence, 
that convulsions were not confessions? 

Thus, in the speaker’s opinion, the fact of censorship refutes 
freedom of the press, a statement which has its factual correctness, 
being a truth of such a factual character that its magnitude can be 
measured topographically, since beyond certain frontier barriers it 
ceases to be factual and true. 

” 

“Neither in speech nor in writing,” we are further instructed, “neither in our 
Rhine Province nor in Germany as a whole, are any shackles to be seen on our true 
and nobler spiritual development.” 

_ The noble lustre of truth in our press is supposed to be a gift of 
the censorship. 

We shall first of all turn the speaker’s ar argument against 
himself; instead of a rational proof we shall give him an ordi- 
nance. In the recent Prussian censorship instruction it is officially 
made known that the press has hitherto been subjected to exces- 
sive restrictions, that it has still to achieve true national content. 
The speaker can see that convictions in our Germany are liable to 
change. 

But what an illogical paradox to regard the censorship as a 
basis for improving our press! 

The greatest orator of the French revolution, whose voix toujours 
tonnante* still echoes in our day; the lion whose roar one must 
have heard oneself in order to join with the people in calling out 
to him: “Well roared, lion!” °— Mirabeau— developed his talent in 
prison. Are prisons on that account schools of eloquence? 

If, despite all spiritual toll systems, the German spirit has become 
capable of large-scale enterprise, it is a truly princely prejudice to 
think that it is the customs barriers and cordons that have made it 

, Ever thundering voice.— Ed. 
ow. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1.— Ed. 

so. The spiritual development of Germany has gone forward not 
owing to, but in spite of, the censorship. If the press under the 
censorship becomes stunted and wretched, this is put forward as 
an argument against a free press although it only testifies against 
an unfree press. If the press, in spite of censorship, retains its 
characteristic essence, this is put forward in support of censorship 
although it only testifies in favour of the spirit and not the fetters. 

By the way, “true and nobler development” is another question. 

In the period of strict observance of censorship from 1819 to 
1830 (later, in a large part of Germany although not in “our 
Germany”, the censorship itself came under censorship owing to 
the circumstances of the time and the unusual convictions which 
had been formed) our literature experienced its “Abendblatt period”, 
which can be called “true and noble and spiritual and rich in de- 
velopment” with as much right as the editor of the Abendzei- 
tung, named “Winkler”, had in humorously adopting the pseudo- 
nym “Bright”, although we cannot even credit him with the bright- 
ness of a bog at midnight. This “backwoodsman”? with the trade 
name “Bright” is the prototype of the literature of the time, and 
that Lenten period will convince posterity that if few saints could 
endure forty days without food, the whole of Germany, which was 
not even saint-like, managed to live over twenty years without 
producing or consuming spiritual nourishment. The press had 
become vile, and one could only hesitate to say whether the lack of 
understanding exceeded the lack of character, and whether the 
absence of form exceeded the absence of content, or the reverse. 
For Germany, criticism would reach its zenith if it could prove that 
that period never existed. The sole literary field in which at that 
time the pulse of a living spirit could still be felt, the philosophical 
field, ceased to speak German, for German had ceased to be the 
language of thought. The spirit spoke in incomprehensible mys- 
terious words because comprehensible words were no longer 
allowed to be comprehended. 

As far then as the example of Rhenish literature is con- 
cerned —and, of course, this example rather closely concerns the 
Rhine Province Assembly—one could wander through all five 
administrative districts with Diogenes’ lantern and nowhere would 
one meet “this man”. We do not regard this as a defect of the 
Rhine Province, but rather as a proof of its practical and political 
good sense. The Rhine Province can produce a “free press”, but for 
an ‘“‘unfree” one it lacks adroitness and illusions. 

2 In German “Krahwinkler”, a pun on the man’s name.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 14] 

The literary period that has just ended, which we could call the 
“literary period of strict censorship”, is therefore clear historical 
proof that the censorship has undoubtedly influenced the develop- 
ment of the German spirit in a disastrous, irresponsible way, and 
that therefore it is by no means destined, as the speaker imagined, 
to be magister bonarum artium.2 Or should one understand by a 
“nobler and true press” one which bears its chains with decency? 

If the speaker “took the liberty” of recalling ‘a well-known 
saying about the little finger and the whole hand”, we take the 
liberty in return of asking whether it does not most befit the 
dignity of a government to give the spirit of the people not merely 
one whole hand but both hands whole? 

As we have seen, our speaker disposes of the relation between 
censorship and spiritual development in a carelessly aristocratic, 
diplomatically sober way. He represents the negative aspect of his 
social estate still more resolutely in his attack on the historical 
shaping of freedom of the press. 

As regards freedom of the press among other nations, he says: 
“England cannot serve as a measuring-rod, because, it is claimed, centuries ago 
conditions were historically created there which could not be brought about in any 
other country by the application of theories, but which had their justification in 
England's specific conditions.” “In Holland, freedom of the press was unable to save 
the country from an oppressive national debt and to a very large extent it helped to 

bring about a revolution which resulted in the loss of half the country.” 

We shall pass over France, to come back to it later. 

“Finally, should it not be possible to find in Switzerland an Eldorado blessed by 
freedom of the press? Does one not think with disgust of the savage party quarrels 
carried on in the newspapers there, in which the parties, with a correct sense of 
their small degree of human dignity, are named after parts of an animal’s body, being 

divided into horn-men and claw-men, and have made themselves despised by all their 
neighbours on account of their boorish, abusive speeches!” 

The English press, he says, is not an argument in favour of 
freedom of the press in general, because of its historical foundations. 
The press in England has merit only because it developed histori- 
cally, not as a press in general, for then, he alleges, it would have 
had to develop without historical foundations. History therefore 
has the merit here, and not the press. As if the press, too, were 
not part of history, as if the English press under Henry VIII, the 
Catholic Mary, Elizabeth and James did not have to wage a hard 
and often savage struggle in order to win for the English nation its 
historical foundations! 

* Teacher of the fine arts.— Ed. 

And would it not, on the contrary, testify in favour of freedom 
of the press if the English press, having the greatest freedom 
from restraint, did not destructively affect the historical founda- 
tions? However, the speaker is not consistent. 

The English press is no proof in favour of the press in general, 
because it is English. The Dutch press testifies against the press in 
general, although it is only Dutch. In the one case all the merits of 
the press are ascribed to the historical foundations, in the other 
case all the defects of the historical foundations are ascribed to the 
press. In the one case the press is not supposed to have had its 
share also in historical progress, in the other case history is not 
supposed to have had its share also in the defects of the press. Just 
as the press in England is bound up with the latter’s history and 
specific conditions, so also in Holland and Switzerland. 

Is the press supposed to reflect, abolish or develop the historical 
foundations? The speaker makes each into a matter of reproach 
for the press. 

He blames the Dutch press, because of its historical development. 
It ought to have prevenied the course of history, it ought to have 
saved Holland from an oppressive national debt! What an unhistori- 
cal demand! The Dutch press could not prevent the period of 
Louis XIV; the Dutch press could not prevent the English navy 
under Cromwell from rising to the first place in Europe; it could 
not cast a spell on the ocean which would have saved Holland 
from the painful role of being the arena of the warring continen- 
tal powers; it was as little able as all the censors in Germany put 
together to annul Napoleon’s despotic decrees. 

But has a free press ever increased national debts? When, under 
the regency of the Duke of Orleans, the whole of France plunged 
into Law’s financial lunacies, who opposed this fantastic storm and 
stress period of money speculations except for a few satirists, who 
of course received not banknotes but notes sending them to the 
Bastille. 

The demand that the press should be the saviour from the na- 
tional debt, which can be extended to say that it should also pay 
the debts of individuals, reminds one of that writer who always 
grumbled at the doctor because, although the latter cured his 
bodily ailments, he did not at the same time correct the misprints 
in his writings. Freedom of the press is as little able to promise to 
make a human being or a nation perfect as the physician. It is 
itself no perfection.* What a trivial way of behaving it is to abuse 

. According to the errata to the Rheinische Zeitung No. 130, May 10, 1842, this 
should read: “It is itself perfection.” — Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 143 

what is good for being some specific good and not all good at 
once, for being this particular good and not some other. Of course, 
if freedom of the press were all in all it would make all other 
functions of a nation, and the nation itself, superfluous. 

The speaker blames the Dutch press for the Belgian revolution 

No one with any historical education will deny that the separa- 
tion of Belgium from Holland was an incomparably greater 
historical event than their union.” 

The press in Holland is said to have brought about the Belgian 
revolution. Which press? The progressive or the reactionary? It is 
a question which we can also raise in France; if the speaker blames 
the clerical Belgian press, which at the same time was democrat- 
ic, he should also blame the clerical press in France, which at the 
same time was absolutist. Both helped to overthrow their govern- 
ments. In France it was not freedom of the press but censorship 
that made for revolution. 

But leaving this out of account, the Belgian revolution appeared 
at first as a spiritual revolution, as.a revolution of the press. The 
assertion that the press caused the Belgian revolution has no sense 
beyond that. But is that a matter for blame? Must the revolution at 
once assume a material form? Strike instead of speaking? The 
government can materialise a spiritual revolution; a material revo- 
lution must first spiritualise the government. 

The Belgian revolution is a product of the Belgian spirit. So the 
press, too, the freest manifestation of the spirit in our day, has its 
share in the Belgian revolution. The Belgian press would not have 
been the Belgian press if it had stood aloof from the revolution, 
but equally the Belgian revolution would not have been Belgian if 
it had not been at the same time a revolution of the press. The 
Revolution of a people is total; that is, each sphere carries it out 
in its own way; why not also the press as the press? 

In blaming the Belgian press, therefore, the speaker is blaming 
Belgium, not the press. It is here that we find the starting point of 
his historical view of freedom of the press. The popular character 
of the free press—and it is well known that even the artist does 
not paint great historical pictures with water-colours — the histor- 
ical individuality of the free press, which makes it the specific 
expression of its specific popular spirit, are repugnant to the speak- 
er from the princely estate. He demands instead that the press 
of the various nations should always be a press holding his views, 
a press of haute volée,* and should revolve around certain individ- 

2 High society. — Ed. 

uals instead of around the spiritual heavenly bodies, the na- 
tions. This demand stands out undisguised in his verdict on the 
Swiss press. 

We permit ourselves a preliminary question. Why did the 
speaker not recall that the Swiss press through Albrecht von 
Haller opposed the Voltairean enlightenment? Why does he not 
bear in mind that even if Switzerland is not exactly an Eldorado, 
nevertheless it has produced the prophet of the future princely 
Eldorado, once again a certain Herr von Haller, who in his 
Restauration der Staatswissenschaften laid the foundation for the | 
“nobler and true” press, for the Berliner politisches Wochenblatt? By 
their fruits ye shall know them. And what other country in the 
world could oppose to Switzerland a fruit of this luscious legiti- 
macy? 

The speaker finds fault with the Swiss press for adopting the 
“animal party names” of “horn-men and claw-men”, in short 
because it speaks in the Swiss language and to Swiss people, who live 
in a certain patriarchal harmony with oxen and cows. The press of 
this country is the press of precisely this country. There is nothing 
more to be said about it. At the same time, however, a free press 
transcends the limitations of a country’s particularism, as once 
again the Swiss press proves. 

As regards animal party names in particular, let us remark that 
religion itself reveres the animal as a symbol of the spiritual. Our 
speaker, of course, will condemn the Indian press, which has 
revered with religious fervour Sabala the cow and Hanuman the 
monkey. He will reproach the Indian press forthe Indian religion, 
just as he does the Swiss press for the Swiss character. But there is 
a press which he will hardly want to subject to censorship; we 
refer to the holy press, the Bible. Does this not divide all mankind 
into the two great parties of sheep and goats? Does not God Himself 
describe his attitude to the houses of Judah and Israel in the 
following terms: I shall be to the house of Judah as a moth and to 
the house of Israel as a maggot.* Or, what is more familiar to us 
laymen, is there not a princely literature which turns all anthropology 
into zoology? We mean the literature of heraldry. That contains 
things still more curious than horn-men and claw-men. 

What, therefore, was the accusation the speaker levelled against 
freedom of the press? That the defects of a nation are at the same time 
the defects of its press, that the press is the ruthless language and 
manifest image of the historical spirit of the people. Did he prove 

* Hosea 5:12, paraphrased.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 145 

that the spirit of the German people is an exception to this great 
natural privilege? He showed that every nation expresses its spirit 
through its press. Ought not the philosophically educated spirit of 
the Germans to be entitled to what, according to the speaker’s own 
assertion, is to be found among the animal-fettered Swiss? 
Finally, does the speaker think that the national defects of a free 
press are not just as much nattonal defects of the censors? Are the 
censors excluded from the historical whole? Are they unaffected 
by the spirit of a time? Unfortunately, it may be so, but what man 
of sound mind would not rather pardon sins of the nation and the 
time in the press than sins against the nation and the time in the 
censorship? 
We remarked in the introduction that the various speakers voice 
the polemic of their particular estate against freedom of the press. 
The speaker from the princely estate put forward in the first place 
diplomatic grounds. He proved that freedom of the press was 
wrong on the basis of the princely convictions clearly enough 
expressed in the censorship laws. He considered that the nobler 
and true development of the German spirit has been created by the 
restrictions from above. Finally, he waged a polemic against the 
peoples and with noble dread repudiated freedom of the press as 
the tactless, indiscreet speech of the people addressed to itself. 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 130, May 10, 1842, Supplement] 

The speaker from the knightly estate, to whom we now come, wages 
his polemic not against the peoples, but against persons. He 
questions human freedom in freedom of the press, and law in the law 
on the press. Before dealing with the actual question of freedom of 
the press, he takes up the question of unabridged and daily 
publication of the Assembly debates. We shall follow him step by step. 

“The first of the proposals for publication of our proceedings suffices.” “Let it be 
in the hands of the Provincial Assembly to make a wise use of the permission granted.” 

That is precisely the punctum quaestionis.2? The province believes 
that the Provincial Assembly will be under its control only when 
the publication of the debates is no longer left to the arbitrary 
decision of the Assembly in its wisdom, but has become a legal ne- 
cessity. We should have to call the new concession a new step back- 
wards if it had to be interpreted in such a way that publication 
depends on an arbitrary decision by the Assembly of the Estates. 

Privileges of the estates are in no way rights of the province. On the 

* The crux of the question.— Ed. 

contrary, the rights of the province cease when they become 
privileges of the estates. Thus the estates of the Middle Ages 
appropriated for themselves all the country’s constitutional rights 
and turned them into privileges against the country. 

The citizen does not want to have anything to do with right as a 
privilege. Can he regard it as a right if new privileged persons are 
_added to the old ones? 

In this way, the rights of the Provincial Assembly are no longer 
rights of the province, but rights against the province, and the Assem- 
bly itself would be the greatest wrong against the province but with 
the mystical significance of being supposed to embody its greatest 
right. | 

How greatly the speaker from the knightly estate is imbued with this 
medieval conception of the Assembly, how unreservedly he upholds 
the privilege of the estate against the rights of the province, will be 
seen from the continuation of his speech. 

“The extension of this permission” (for publication of the debates) “could only 
result from inner conviction, but not from external influences.” 

A surprising turn of phrase! The influence of the province on 
its Assembly is characterised as something external to which the 
conviction of the Assembly of the Estates is contrasted as a delicate 
inner feeling whose highly sensitive nature calls out to the province: 
Noli me tangere!* This plaintive rhetoric about “inner conviction” in 
contrast to the rude, external, unauthorised north wind of “public 
conviction” is the more noteworthy since the purpose of the 
proposal was precisely to make the inner conviction of the 
Assembly of the Estates external. Here too, of course, there is an 
inconsistency. Where it seems to the speaker more convenient, in 
church controversies, he appeals to the province. 

“We,” continues the speaker, “would let it” (publication) “take place where we 

consider this expedient, and would restrict it where an extension would appear to us 
purposeless or even harmful.” 

We will do what we like. Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione 
voluntas.” It is truly the language of a ruler, which naturally has a 
pathetic flavour when coming from a modern baron. 

Who are we? The estates. The publication of the debates is 
intended for the province and not for the éstates, but the speaker 
teaches us to know better. Publication of the debates also is a 
privilege of the Assembly of the Estates, which has the right, if it 

* Touch me not! — Ed. 

> Thus I wish it, thus I order it; the will takes the place of reason (Juvenal, 
Satires, vi, 223).— Ed. : 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 147 

thinks fit, to have its wisdom echoed by the many voices of the 
press. 

The speaker knows only the province of the estates, not the es- 
tates of the province. The Assembly of the Estates has a province 
to which the privilege of its activity extends, but the province has 
no estates through which it could itself be active. Of course, 
the province has the right, under prescribed conditions, to 
create these gods for itself, but as soon as they are created, 
it must, like a fetish worshipper, forget that these gods are its 
own handiwork. 

In this connection there is no telling, inter alia, why a monarchy 
without a Provincial Assembly is not of more value than a monarchy 
with a Provincial Assembly, for if the Assembly does not represent 
the will of the province, we have more confidence in the public 
intelligence of the government than in the private intelligence of 
landed property. 

We are confronted here with the peculiar spectacle, due perhaps 

to the nature of the Provincial Assembly, of the province having to 
fight not so much through its representatives as against them. 
According to the speaker, the Assembly does not regard the 
general rights of the province as the Assembly’s only privileges, 
for in that case the daily unabridged publication of the Assembly 
proceedings would be a new right of the Assembly, because it 
would be a new right of the province; on the contrary, according 
to the speaker, the province must regard the privileges of the 
Assembly of the Estates as the province’s only rights; and why not 
also the privileges of some class of officials and of the nobility or 
the clergy! 

Indeed, our speaker declares quite openly that the privileges of 
the Assembly of the Estates decrease in proportion as the rights of 
the province increase. 

“Just as it seems to him desirable that here in the Assembly there should be 
freedom of discussion and that an over-anxious weighing of words should be avoided, 
it seems to him equally necessary, in order to maintain this freedom of expression and 

this frankness of speech, that our words at the time should be judged only by those 
for whom they are intended.” 

Precisely because freedom of discussion, the speaker concludes, 
is desirable in our Assembly—and what freedoms would we not 
find desirable where we are concerned? — precisely for that reason 
freedom of discussion is not desirable in the province. Because it is 
desirable that we speak frankly, it is still more desirable to keep the 
province in thrall to secrecy. Our words are not intended for the 
province. 

One must acknowledge the tact with which the speaker has 
perceived that by unabridged publication of its debates the 
Assembly would become a right of the province instead of a 
privilege of the Assembly of the Estates, that the Assembly, having 
become an immediate object of the public spirit, would have to 
decide to be a personification of the latter, and that, having been 
put in the light of the general consciousness, it would have to 
renounce its particular nature in favour of the general one. 

But whereas the knightly speaker mistakenly regards person- 
al privileges and individual freedoms vis-a-vis the nation and the 
government as general rights, and thereby unquestionably and 
pertinently expresses the exclusive spirit of his estate, on the 
other hand he interprets the spirit of the province in an absolute- 
ly wrong way by likewise transforming its general demands into 
personal desires. 

Thus the speaker seems to impute to the province a personally 
passionate curiosity as regards our words (i.e., those of prominent 
persons in the Assembly of ‘the Estates). 

We assure him that the province is by no means curious about 
“the words” of the representatives of the estates as individuals, 
and only “such” words can they rightly call “their” words. On the 
contrary, the province demands that the words of the representa- 
tives of the estates should be converted into the publicly audible 
voice of the country. 

The question is whether the province should be conscious of being 
represented or not! Should a new mystery of representation be 
added to the mystery of government? In the government, too, the 
people is represented. Hence a new representation of the people 
through the estates is quite meaningless unless its specific charac- 
ter is precisely that in this case matters are not dealt with on 
behalf of the province but, on the contrary, the province itself 
deals with them; that the province is not represented in it but 
rather represents itself. A representation which is divorced from 
the consciousness of those whom it represents is no representation. 
What I do not know, I do not worry about. It is a senseless 
contradiction that the functioning of the state, which primar- 
ily expresses the self-activity of the individual provinces, takes 
place without their formal co-operation, without their joint knowl- 
edge; it is a senseless contradiction that my self-activity should con- 
sist of acts unknown to me and done by another. 

A publication of the Assembly proceedings that depends on the 
arbitrary ruling of the Assembly of the Estates, however, is worse 
than none at all, for if the Assembly tells me not what it is in 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 149 

reality, but what it wants to seem to be in my eyes, I shall take it 
for what it gives itself out to be, for mere semblance, and things 
are bad when semblance has a legal existence. 

Indeed, can even daily, unabridged publication by printing be 
rightly called unabridged and public? Is there no abridgement in 
substituting the written for the spoken word, graphic systems for 
persons, action on paper for real action? Or does publicity consist 
only in a real matter being reported to the public, and not rather 
in its being reported to the real public, 1.e., not to an imaginary 
reading public, but to the living and actually present public? 

Nothing is more contradictory than that the highest public activity 
of the province is secret, that in private lawsuits the doors of the 
court are open to the province, but that in its own lawsuit the 
province has to remain outside. 

In its true consistent meaning, therefore, unabridged publica- 
tion of the Assembly proceedings can only be full publicity for the 
activity of the Assembly. 

Our speaker, however, proceeds to regard the Assembly as a 
kind of club. 

“From many years’ acquaintance, a good personal understanding has developed 
among most of us in spite of the most diverse views on various matters, a 
relationship which is inherited by newcomers. 

“Precisely for that reason we are most of all able to appreciate the value of our 
words, and do so the more frankly as we allow ourselves to be less subject to external 
influences, which could only be useful if they came to us in the form of well- 
meaning counsel, but not in the form of a dogmatic judgment, of praise or 
blame, seeking to influence our personality through public opinion.” 

The Herr Speaker appeals to our feelings. 

We are so intimate together, we discuss things so openly, we 
weigh the value of our words so exactly; are we to allow our 
attitude, which is so patriarchal, so distinguished, so convenient, to 
be changed by the judgment of the province, which perhaps 
attaches less value to our words? 

God help us! The Assembly cannot bear the light of day. We 
feel more at ease in the darkness of private life. If the whole 
province has sufficient confidence to entrust its rights to single 
individuals, it is obvious that these individuals are condescend- 
ing enough to accept the confidence of the province, but it 
would be really extravagant to demand that they should repay like 
for like and trustingly surrender themselves, their achievements, 
their personalities, to the judgment of the province, which has 
already pronounced a significant judgment on them. In any case, 
it is more important that the personality of the representatives of 

150 | Karl Marx 

the estates should not be endangered by the province than that 
the interests of the province should not be endangered by the 
representatives of the estates. 

We want to be both fair and very gracious. It is true that 
we—and we are a sort of government—permit no dogmatic 
judgment, no praise or blame, no influence of public opinion on 
our persona sacrosancta, but we do allow well-meaning counsel, not in 
the abstract sense that it means well for the country, but in the 
fuller-sounding sense that it expresses a passionate tenderness for 
the members of the estates, a specially high opinion of their 
excellence. 

True, one might think that if publicity is harmful to good 
understanding among us, then the latter must be harmful to 
publicity. However this sophistry forgets that the Provincial As- 
sembly is the Assembly of the Estates and not the Assembly of the 
Province. And who could resist the most convincing of all 
arguments? If, in accordance with the constitution, the province 
appoints estates to represent its general intelligence, it thereby totally 
renounces all its own judgment and understanding, which are now 
solely incorporated in the chosen representatives. Just as the 
legend has it that great inventors were put to death or, what is no 
legend, that they were buried alive in fortresses as soon as they 
had imparted their secret to the ruler, so the political reason of 
the province always falls on its own sword as soon as it has made 
its great invention of the Assembly, but of course to rise again like 
the phoenix for the next elections. 

After these obtrusively emotional descriptions of the dangers 
threatening the personalities of the estates from outside, i.e., from 
the province, through publication of the proceedings, the speaker 
closes this diatribe with the guiding thought that we have traced 
through his speech up to now. 

“Parliamentary freedom,” a very fine-sounding expression, “‘is in its first period of 
development. It must gain by protection and care that internal force and independence 

which are absolutely necessary before it can be exposed without detriment to 
external storms.” 

Once again the old fatal antithesis of the Assembly as something 
internal and the province as something external. 

In any case, we have long been of the opinion that parliamentary 
freedom is at the beginning of its beginning, and the above speech 
has convinced us afresh that the primitiae studiorum in politicis? 
have still not been completed. But by that we by no means im- 

* Primary studies in politics.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 151 

ply —and the above speech once again confirms our opinion — 
that the Assembly should be given a still longer time in which to 
continue its independent ossification in opposition to the province. 
Perhaps by parliamentary freedom the speaker understands the free- 
dom of the old French parliaments. According to his own admis- 
sion, a many years’ acquaintance prevails among the Assembly of the 
Estates, its spirit is even transmitted as a hereditary disease to the 
homines novi, yet the time has still not come for publicity? The 
Twelfth Assembly may give the same reply as the Sixth, only with 
the more emphatic expression that it is too independent to allow 
itself to be deprived of the aristocratic privilege of secret proceedings. 

Of course, the development of parliamentary freedom in the old 
French sense, independence from public opinion, and the stagna- 
tion of the caste spirit, advance most thoroughly through isolation, 
but to warn against precisely this development cannot be prema- 
ture. A truly political assembly flourishes only under the great 
protection of the public spirit, just as living things flourish only 
in the open air. Only “exotic” plants, which have been trans- 
ferred to a climate that is foreign to them, require the protection 
and care of a greenhouse. Does the speaker regard the Assembly 
as an “exotic” plant in the free, serene climate of the Rhine 
Province? 

In view of the fact that our speaker from the knightly estate 
expounded with almost comic seriousness, with almost melancholy 
dignity and almost religious pathos, the thesis of the lofty wisdom of 
the Assembly of the Estates, as also of its medieval freedom and 
independence, the uninitiated will be surprised to see him sink in 
the question of the freedom of the press from the lofty wisdom of the 
Provincial Assembly to the general lack of wisdom of the human race, 
from the independence and freedom of the privileged social 
estates he had extolled only just before to the fundamental lack of 
freedom and independence of human nature. We are not surprised to 
encounter here one of the present-day numerous champions of 
the Christian-knightly, modern feudal principle, in short the 
romantic principle. 

These gentlemen, because they want to regard freedom not as 
the natural gift of the universal sunlight of reason, but as the 
supernatural gift of a specially favourable constellation of the 
stars, because they regard freedom as merely an individual property 
of certain persons and social estates, are in consequence compelled 
to include universal reason and universal freedom among the bad 
ideas and phantoms of “logically constructed systems’. In order to 
save the special freedoms of privilege, they proscribe the universal 

152 Kar] Marx 

freedom of human nature. Since, however, the bad brood of the 
nineteenth century, and the very consciousness of the modern 
knights that has been infected by this century, cannot comprehend 
what is in itself incomprehensible, because devoid of idea, namely, 
how internal, essential, universal determinations prove to be linked 
with certain human individuals by external, fortuitous, particular 
features, without being connected with the human essence, with 
reason in general, and therefore common to all individuals — be- 
cause of this they necessarily have recourse to the miraculous and 
the mystical. Further, because the real position of these gentlemen 
in the modern state does not at all correspond to the notion they 
have of that position, because they live in a world beyond the real 
one, and because therefore imagination is their head and heart, 
being dissatisfied with their practical activity, they necessarily have 
recourse to theory, but to the theory of the other world, to religion, 
which in their hands, however, is given a polemical bitterness 
impregnated with political tendencies and becomes more or less 
consciously only a holy cloak for very secular, but at the same time 
fantastic desires. 

Thus we shall find that to practical demands our speaker 
counterposes a mystical religious theory of the imagination, to real 
theories—a pettily clever, pragmatically cunning wisdom of ex- 
perience drawn from the most superficial practice, to the human 
understanding — superhuman holiness, and to the real holiness of 
ideas—the arbitrariness and disbelief characterising a base point 
of view. The more aristocratic, more nonchalant, and therefore 
more sober, language of the speaker from the princely estate is 
superseded here by emotional affectation and fantastically ex- 
travagant unction, which previously withdrew much more into the 
background before the feeling of privilege. 

“The less it is possible to deny that the press nowadays is a political power, the 
more erroneous seems to him the equally widespread view that truth and light will 
.emerge from the struggle between the good and the bad press and can be expected to 
become more widely and effectively disseminated. Man, individually and in the mass, 
ts always one and the same. He is by his nature imperfect and immature and needs 
education as long as his development continues, and it ceases only with his death. The 
art of education, however, does not consist in punishing prohibited actions, but in 
furthering good influences and keeping away evil ones. It is, however, inseparable 
from this human imperfection that the siren song of evil has a powerful effect on the 
masses and opposes the simple and sober voice of truth as an obstacle which, even 
if not absolute, is in any case difficult to overcome. The bad press appeals only to 
men’s passions; no means are too bad for it when it is a question of attaining its aim 
by arousing passions—that aim being the greatest possible dissemination of bad 

principles and the greatest possible furtherance of bad frames of mind; it has at its dis- 
posal all the advantages of that most dangerous of all offensives, for which there are 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 153 

objectively no restrictions of right and subjectively no laws of morality or even of 
external decency. On the other hand, the good press is always confined to the 
defensive. For the most part its effect can only be that of defending, restraining and 
consolidating, without being able to boast of any significant progress in enemy 
territory. It is good fortune enough if external obstacles do not render this still 
more difficult”. 

We have given this passage in full in order not to weaken its 
possible emotional impression on the reader. 

The speaker has put himself a la hauteur des principes.* In order 
to combat freedom of the press, the thesis of the permanent immaturity 
of the human race has to be defended. It is sheer tautology to 
assert that if absence of freedom is men’s essence, freedom is 
contrary to his essence. Malicious sceptics could be daring enough 
not to take the speaker at his word. 

If the immaturity of the human race is the mystical ground for 
opposing freedom of the press, then the censorship at any rate is a 
highly reasonable means against the maturity of the human race. 

What undergoes development is imperfect. Development ends 
only with death. Hence it would be truly consistent to kill man in 
order to free him from this state of imperfection. That at least is 
what the speaker concludes in order to kill freedom of the press. 
In his view, true education consists in keeping a person wrapped 
up in a cradle throughout his life, for as soon as he learns to walk, 
he learns also to fall, and only by falling does he learn to walk. 
But if we all remain in swaddling-clothes, who is to wrap us in 
them? If we all remain in the cradle, who is to rock us? If we are 
all prisoners, who is to be prison warder? 

Man, individually and in the mass, is imperfect by nature. De 
principiis non est disputandum.> Granted! What follows from that? 
The arguments of our speaker are imperfect, governments are 
imperfect, assemblies are imperfect, freedom of the press is 
imperfect, every sphere of human existence is imperfect. Hence if 
one of these spheres ought not to exist because of this imperfec- 
tion, none of them has the right to exist, man in general has no 
right to exist. 

Given man’s fundamental imperfection—let us assume it is 
true—then we know in advance that all human institutions are 
imperfect. There is no need to touch on that further, it does not 
speak for them or against them, it is not their specific character, it is 
not their distinctive mark. 

* On the level of his principles.— Ed. 
> There can be no dispute about principles.— Ed. 

Amid all these imperfections, why should precisely the free 
press be perfect? Why does an imperfect provincial estate demand 
a perfect press? 

The imperfect requires education. Is not education also human 
and therefore imperfect? Does not education itself also require 
education? 

If then, by its very existence, everything human is imperfect, 
ought we therefore to lump everything together, have the same 
respect for everything, good and evil, truth and falsehood? The 
true conclusion must be that as in looking at a picture I have 
to leave the spot from which I see only blots of colour but not 
colours, irregularly intersecting lines but not a drawing, similarly I 
must abandon the point of view which shows me the world and 
human relations only in their most external appearance, and 
recognise that this point of view is unsuitable for judging the value 
of things; for how could I judge, distinguish things, from a point 
of view which admits only the one flat idea about the whole 
universe that everything in it is imperfect? This point of view itself 
is the most imperfect of all the imperfections it sees around it. We 
must therefore take the essence of the inner idea as the measure 
to evaluate the existence of things. Then we shall less allow 
ourselves to be led astray by a one-sided and trivial experience, 
since in such cases the result is indeed that all experience 
ceases, all judgment is abolished, all cows are black. 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 132, May 12, 1842, Supplement] 

From the standpoint of the idea, it is self-evident that freedom 
of the press has a justification quite different from that of cen- 
sorship because it is itself an embodiment of the idea, an embod- 
iment of freedom, a positive good, whereas censorship is an 
embodiment of unfreedom, the polemic of a world outlook of 
semblance against the world outlook of essence; it has a merely 
negative nature. 

No! No! No! our speaker breaks in. I do not find fault with the 
semblance, but with the essence. Freedom is the wicked feature of 
freedom of the press. Freedom creates the possibility of evil. 
Therefore freedom is evil. 

Evil freedom! 

“He has stabbed her in the dark forest 
And sunk the body in the depths of the Rhine!’’* 

* L. Uhland, Die Rache (paraphrased).— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 155 

But: 
“This time I must talk to you, 
Lord and master, hear me calmly 

But does not freedom of the press exist in the land of censorship? The 
press in general is a realisation of human freedom. Consequently, 
where is a press there is freedom of the press. 

True, in the land of censorship the state has no freedom of the 
press, but one organ of the state has it, viz., the government. Apart 
from the fact that official government documents enjoy perfect 
freedom of the press, does not the censor exercise daily an 
unconditional freedom of the press, if not directly, then indirectly? 

Writers are, as it were, his secretaries. When the secretary does 
not express the opinion of his chief, the latter strikes out the 
botch. Hence the censorship makes the press. 

The censor’s deletions are for the press what the straight 
lines — kus *” — of the Chinese are for their thought. The censor’s 
kus are the categories of literature, and it is well known that the 
categories are the typical souls of the whole content. 

Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents 
implement it while combating its reality; they want to appropriate 
for themselves as a most precious ornament what they have 
rejected as an ornament of human nature. 

No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of 
others. Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at 
one time as a special privilege, at another as a universal right. 

The question has now for the first time been given a consistent 
meaning. It is not a question whether freedom of the press ought to 
exist, for it always exists. The question is whether freedom ofthe 
press is a privilege of particular individuals or whether it is a priv- 
ilege of the human mind. The question is whether a right of one 
side ought to be a wrong for the other side. The question is whether 
“freedom of the mind” has more right than “freedom against the mind”. 

If, however, the “free press” and “freedom of the press” as the 
realisation of “universal freedom” are to be rejected, then this 
applies still more to censorship and the censored press as the 
realisation of a special freedom, for how can the species be good if 
the genus is bad? If the speaker were consistent he would have to 
reject not the free press, but the press as a whole. According to 
him, the press would only be good if it were not a product of 
freedom, i.e., not a human product. Hence in general only animals 
or gods would have the right to a press. 

joa 

4 J. Goethe, Der Zauberlehrling. — Ed. 

156 Karl Marx _ 

Or ought we perhaps—the speaker dare not say it out- 
right— to suppose divine inspiration of the government and of the 
speaker himself? 

If a private person boasts of divine inspiration, there is only one 
speaker in our society who can refute him officially, viz., the 
psychiatrist. 

English history, however, has sufficiently well demonstrated how 
the assertion of divine inspiration from above gives rise to the 
counter-assertion of divine inspiration from below; Charles I went 
to the scaffold as the result of divine inspiration from below. 

True, our speaker from the knightly estate proceeds, as we shall 
hear later, to describe censorship and freedom of the press, the 
censored press and the free press, as two evils, but he does not go 
so far as to admit that the press in general is an evil. 

On the contrary! He divides the entire press into “good” and 
“bad”. 

About the bad press, we are told something incredible: that its 
aim is badness and the greatest possible dissemination of badness. 
We pass over the fact that the speaker has too much confidence in 
our credulity when he demands that we should take his word for 
it and believe in badness as a profession. We merely remind him of 
the axiom that everything human is imperfect. Will not, therefore, 
the bad press also be imperfectly bad, and therefore good, and the 
good press imperfectly good, and therefore bad? 

The speaker, however, shows us the reverse side. He asserts that 
the bad press is better than the good press, for it is always on the 
offensive, whereas the good press is on the defensive. But he has 
himself told us that man’s development ends only with his death. Of 
course, he has not told us much by that, he has said nothing but 
that life ends with death. But if human life is development and 
the good press is always on the defensive, acting only by 
“defending, restraining and consolidating” itself, does it not 
thereby continually oppose development, and therefore life? 
Hence either this good defensive press is bad, or development is 
the bad thing. In view of this, the speaker’s previous assertion, too, 
that the aim of the “bad press is the greatest possible dissemina- 
tion of bad principles and the greatest possible furtherance of bad 
frames of mind” loses its mystical incredibility in a rational 
interpretation: the bad feature of the bad press lies in the greatest 
possible dissemination of principles and the greatest possible 
furtherance of a frame of mind. 

The relation of the good press to the bad press becomes still 
stranger when the speaker assures us that the good press is 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 157 

impotent and the bad press omnipotent, for the former is without 
effect on the people, whereas the latter has an irresistible effect. 
For the spéaker, the good press and the impotent press are 
identical. Does he want to say, therefore, that what is good is 
impotent or that what is impotent is good? 

He contrasts the sober voice of the good press to the siren song 
of the bad press. But surely a sober voice allows of the best and 
most effective singing. The speaker seems to be acquainted only 
with the sensuous heat of passion, but not with the hot passion of 
truth, not with the victory-assured enthusiasm of reason, not the 
irresistible ardour of moral powers. 

Under the frames of mind of the bad press he includes “pride, 
which recognises no authority in church and state”, “envy”, which 
preaches abolition of the aristocracy, and other things, which we 
shall deal with later. For the time being, let us be satisfied with the 
question: Whence does the speaker know that this isolated element 
is the good? If the universal powers of life are bad and we have 
heard that the bad is omnipotent, that it is what influences the 
masses, what or who has still any right to claim to be good? The 
arrogant assertion is this: my individuality is the good, those few 
individuals who are in accord with my individuality are the good, 
and the wicked, bad press refuses to recognise it. The bad press! 

If at the beginning the speaker turned his attack on freedom of 
the press into an attack on freedom in general, here he turns it 
into an attack on the good. His fear of the bad is seen to be a fear 
of the good. Hence he founds censorship on a recognition of the 
bad and a refusal to recognise the good. Do I not despise a man to 
whom I say in advance: your opponent is bound to be victorious 
in the struggle, because, although you yourself are a very sober 
fellow and a very good neighbour, you are a very poor hero; 
because, although you bear consecrated arms, you do not know 
how to use them; because, although you and I, both of us, are 
perfectly convinced of your perfection, the world will never share 
this conviction; because, although things are all right as regards 
your intention, they are in a bad way as regards your energy? 

Although the speaker’s distinction between the good press and 
the bad press makes any further refutation superfluous, since this 
distinction becomes entangled in its own contradictions, neverthe- 
less we must not lose sight of the main thing, namely, that the 
speaker has formulated the question quite incorrectly and has 
based himself on what he had to prove. 

If one wants to speak of two kinds of press, the distinction 
between them must be drawn from the nature of the press itself, 

not from considerations lying outside it. The censored press or the 
free press, one of these two must be the good or the bad press. 

The debate turns precisely on whether the censored press or the 
free press is good or bad, i.e., whether it is in the nature of the 
press to have a free or unfree existence. To make the bad press a 
refutation of the free press is to maintain that the free press is bad 
and the censored press good, which is precisely what had to be 
proved. 

Base frames of mind, personal intrigues, infamies, occur alike in 
‘the censored and the free press. Therefore the generic difference 
between them is not that they produce individual products of this 
or that kind; flowers grow also in swamps. We are concerned here 
with the essence, the inner character, which distinguishes the 
censored from the free press. 

A free press that is bad does not correspond to its essence. The 
censored press with its hypocrisy, its lack of character, its eunuch’s 
language, its dog-like tail-wagging, merely realises the inner con- 
ditions of its essential nature. 

The censored press remains bad even when it turns out good 
products, for these products are good only insofar as they rep- 
resent the free press within the censored press, and insofar as it is 
not in their character to be products of the censored press. The 
free press remains good even when it produces bad products, for 
the latter are deviations from the essential nature of the free 
press. A eunuch remains a bad human being even when he has a 
good voice. Nature remains good even when she produces mon- 
strosities. 

The essence of the free press is the saaciental rational, moral 
essence of freedom. The character of the censored press is the 
characterless monster of unfreedom; it is a civilised monster, a 
perfumed abortion. | 

Or does it still need to be proved that freedom of the press is in 
accord with the essence of the press, whereas censorship con- 
tradicts it? Is it not self-evident that external barriers to a spiritual 
life are not part of the inner nature of this life, that they deny this 
life and do not affirm it? 

In order really to justify censorship, the speaker would have 
- had to prove that censorship is part of the essence of freedom of 
the press; instead he proves that freedom is not part of man’s 
essence. He rejects the whole genus in order to obtain one good 
species, for is not freedom after all the generic essence of all 
spiritual existence, and therefore of the press as well? In order to 
abolish the possibility of evil, he abolishes the possibility of good 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 159 

and realises evil, for only that which is a realisation of freedom 
can be humanly good. 

We shall therefore continue to regard the censored press as a 
bad press so long as it has not been proved to us that censorship 
arises from the very essence of freedom of the press. 

But even supposing that censorship and the nature of the press 
come into being together, although no animal, let alone an 
intelligent being, comes into the world in chains, what follows 
from that? That freedom of the press, as it exists from the official 
viewpoint, that is, the censorship, also needs censorship. And who 
is to censor the governmental press, if not the popular press? 

True, another speaker thinks that the evil of censorship would 
be removed by being tripled, by the local censorship being put 
under provincial censorship, and the latter in its turn under Berlin 
censorship, freedom of the press being made one-sided, and the 
censorship many-sided. So many roundabout ways merely to live! 
Who is to censor the Berlin censorship? Let us therefore return to 
our speaker. 

At the very beginning, he informed us that no light would 
emerge from the struggle between the good and the bad press. 
But, we may now ask, does he not want to make this useless 
struggle permanent? According to his own statement, is not the 
struggle itself between the censorship and the press a struggle 
between the good and the bad press? 

Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, 
it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a 
struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power 
against power without principle. The true censorship, based on 
the very essence of freedom of the press, is criticism. This is the 
tribunal which freedom of the press gives rise to of itself. 
Censorship is criticism as a monopoly of the government. But does 
not criticism lose its rational character if it is not open but secret, 
if it is not theoretical but practical, if it is not above parties but 
itself a party, if it operates not with the sharp knife of reason but 
with the blunt scissors of arbitrariness, if it only exersises criticism 
but will not submit to it, if it disavows itself during its realisation, 
and, finally, if it is so uncritical as to mistake an individual person 
for universal wisdom, peremptory orders for rational statements, 
ink spots for patches of sunlight, the crooked deletions of the 
censor for mathematical constructions, and crude force for deci- 
sive arguments? 

During our exposal, we have shown how the fantastic, unctuous, 
soft-hearted mysticism of the speaker turns into the hard-hearted- 

ness of pettifogging mental pragmatism and into the narrow- 
mindedness of an unprincipled empirical calculation. In his 
arguments on the relation between the censorship law and the press law, 
between preventive and repressive measures, he spares us this trouble 
by proceeding himself to make a conscious application of his 
mysticism. 

“Preventive or repressive measures, censorship or press law, this alone i is the ques- 
tion at issue, in which connection it would not be inexpedient to examine some- 
what more closely the dangers which have to be removed on one side or the other. 
Whereas censorship seeks to prevent what is evil, the press law seeks by punishment 
to guard against its repetition. Like all human institutions, both are imperfect, but the 
question here is which is the less so. Since it is a matter of purely spiritual things, 
one problem — indeed the most important for both of them—can never be solved. 
That is the problem of finding a form which expresses the intention of the 
legislator so clearly and definitely that right and wrong seem to be sharply 
separated and all arbitrariness removed. But what is arbitrariness except acting 
according to individual discretion? And how are the effects of individual discretion 
to be removed where purely spiritual things are concerned? To find the guiding 
line, so sharply drawn that inherent in it is the necessity of having to be applied in 
every single case in the meaning intended by the legislator, that is the philosopher’s 
stone, which has not been discovered so far and is hardly likely to be. Hence 
arbitrariness, if by that one understarids acting according to individual discretion, is 
inseparable both from censorship and from the press law. Therefore we have to 
consider both in their necessary imperfection and its consequences. If the 
censorship suppresses much that is good, the press law will not be capable of 
preventing much that is bad. Truth, however, cannot be suppressed for long. The 
more obstacles are put in its way, the more keenly it pursues its goal, and the more 
resoundingly it achieves it. But the bad word, like Greek fire, cannot be stopped 
after it has left the ballista, and is incalculable in its effects, because for it nothing is 
holy, and it is inextinguishable because it finds nourishment and means of 
propagation in human hearts.” 

The speaker is not fortunate in his comparisons. He is overcome 
with a poetic exultation as soon as he begins to describe the 
omnipotence of the bad. We have already heard how the voice of 
the good has an impotent, because sober, sound when pitted 
against the siren song of evil. Now evil even becomes Greek fire, 
whereas the speaker has nothing at all with which to compare 
truth, and if we were to put his “sober” words into a comparison, 
truth would be at best a flint, which scatters sparks the more 
brightly the more it is struck. A fine argument for slave trad- 
ers—to bring out the Negro’s human nature by flogging, an 
excellent maxim for the legislator —to issue repressive laws against 
truth so that it will the more keenly pursue its goal. The speaker 
seems to have respect for truth only when it becomes primitive and 
Spontaneous and is manifested tangibly. The more barriers you put 
in the way of truth, the more vigorous is the truth you obtain! Up 
with the barriers! 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 161 

But let us allow the sirens to sing! 

The speaker’s mystical “theory of imperfection” has at last borne 
its earthly fruits; it has thrown its moonstones at us; let us 
examine the moonstones! 

Everything is imperfect. The censorship is imperfect, the press 
law is imperfect. That determines their essence. There is nothing 
more to say about the correctness of their idea, nothing remains 
for us to do except, from the standpoint of the very lowest em- 
piricism, to find out by calculating probabilities on which side the 
most dangers lie. It is purely a difference of time whether meas- 
ures are taken to prevent the evil itself by means of censorship or 
repetition of the evil by means of the press law. 

One sees how the speaker, by the empty phrase about “human 
imperfection”, manages to evade the essential, internal, charac- 
teristic difference between censorship and press law and trans- 
forms the controversy from a question of principle into a fair- 
ground dispute as to whether more bruised noses result from the 
censorship or from the press law. 

If, however, a contrast is drawn between the press law and the 
censorship law, it is, in the first place, not a question of their 
consequences, but of their basis, not of their individual applica- 
tion, but of their legitimacy in general. Montesquieu has already 
taught us that despotism is more convenient to apply than legality 
and Machiavelli asserts that for princes the bad has better 
consequences than the good. Therefore, if we do not want to 
confirm the old Jesuitical maxim that a good end—and we doubt 
even the goodness of the end — justifies bad means, we have above 
all to investigate whether censorship by its essence is a good means. 

The speaker is right in calling the censorship law a preventive 
measure, it is a precautionary measure of the police against freedom, 
but he is wrong in calling the press law a repressive measure. It is 
the rule of freedom itself which makes itself the yardstick of its 
own exceptions. The censorship measure is not a law. The press 
law is not a measure. 

In the press law, freedom punishes. In the censorship law, 
freedom is punished. The censorship law is a law of suspicion 
against freedom. The press law is a vote of confidence which 
freedom gives itself. The press law punishes the abuse of freedom. 
The. censorship law punishes freedom as an abuse. It treats 
freedom as a criminal, or is it not regarded in every sphere as a 
degrading punishment to be under police supervision? The 
censorship law has only the form of a law. The press law is a real 
law. 

7* 

The press law is a real law because it is the positive existence of 
freedom. It regards freedom as the normal state of the press, the 
press as the mode of existence of freedom, and hence only comes 
into conflict with a press offence as an exception that contravenes 
its own rules and therefore annuls itself. Freedom of the press 
asserts itself as a press law, against attacks on freedom of the press 
itself, i.e., against press offences. The press law declares freedom 
to be inherent in the nature of the criminal. Hence what he has 
done against freedom he has done against himself and _ this 
self-injury appears to him as a punishment in which he sees a recog- 
nition of his freedom. 

The press law, therefore, is far from being a repressive measure 
against freedom of the press, a mere means of preventing the 
repetition of a crime through fear of punishment. On the 
contrary, the absence of press legislation must be regarded as an 
exclusion of freedom of the press from the sphere of legal 
freedom, for legally recognised freedom exists in the state as law. 
Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any. 
more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against 
motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the 
eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills 
me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the 
positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an 
impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness 
of the individual. A statute-book is a people’s bible of freedom. 

Therefore the press law is the legal recognition of freedom of the 
press. It constitutes right, because it is the positive existence of 
freedom. It must therefore exist, even if it is never put into appli- 
cation, as in North America, whereas censorship, like slavery, can 
never become lawful, even if it exists a thousand times over asa law. 

There are no actual preventive laws. Law prevents only as a 
command. It only becomes effective law when it is infringed, for it 1s 
true law only when in it the unconscious natural law of freedom 
has become conscious state law. Where the law is real law, i.e., a 
form of existence of freedom, it is the real existence of freedom 
for man. Laws therefore, cannot prevent a man’s actions, for they 
are indeed the inner laws of life of his action itself, the conscious 
reflections of his life. Hence law withdraws into the background in 
the face of man’s life as a life of freedom, and only when his 
actual behaviour has shown that he has ceased to obey the natural 
law of freedom does law in the form of state law compel him to be 
free, just as the laws of physics confront me as something alien 
only when my life has ceased to be the life of these laws, when it 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 163 

has been struck by illness. Hence a preventive law is a meaningless 
contradiction. 

A preventive law, therefore, has within it no measure, no ration- 
al rule, for a rational rule can only result from the nature of a 
thing, in this instance of freedom. It is without measure, for if pre- 
vention of freedom is to be effective, it must be as all-embracing 
as its object, i.e., unlimited. A preventive law is therefore the 
contradiction of an unlimited limitation, and the boundary where 
it ceases is fixed not by necessity, but by the fortuitousness of 
arbitrariness, as the censorship daily demonstrates ad oculos.? 

The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are 
inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, 
and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the 
doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be 
regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treat- 
ment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than 
life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life 
involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is 
hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an 
illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, 
but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the 
spirit more right than the body? Of course, this right has often 
been interpreted to mean that for minds capable of free motion 
physical freedom of movement is even harmful and therefore they 
are to be deprived of it. The starting point of the censorship is 
that illness is the normal state, or that the normal state, freedom, 
is to be regarded as an illness. The censorship continually assures 
the press that it, the press, is ill; and even if the latter furnishes 
the best proofs of its bodily health, it has to allow itself to be 
treated. But the censorship is not even a learned physician who 
applies different internal remedies according to the illness. It is a 
country surgeon who knows only a single mechanical panacea for 
everything, the scissors. It is not even a surgeon who aims at 
restoring my health, it is a surgical aesthete who considers super- 
fluous everything about my body that displeases him, and removes 
whatever he finds repugnant; it is a quack who drives back a rash so 
that it is not seen, without caring in the least whether it then affects 
more sensitive internal parts. 

You think it wrong to put birds in cages. Is not the cage a 
preventive measure against birds of prey, bullets and storms? You 
think it barbaric to blind nightingales, but it does not seem to you 

* Before one’s eyes.— Ed. 

at all barbaric to put out the eyes of the press with the sharp pens 
of the censorship. You regard it as despotic to cut a free person’s 
hair against his will, but the censorship daily cuts into the flesh of 
thinking people and allows only bodies without hearts, submissive 
bodies which show no reaction, to pass as healthy! 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 135, May 15, 1842, Supplement] 

We have shown how the press law expresses a right and the 
censorship law a wrong. The censorship itself, however, admits 
that it is not an end in itself, that it is not something good in and 
for itself, that its basis therefore is the principle: “The end 
justifies the means.” But an end which requires unjustified means 
is no justifiable end, and could not the press also adopt the 
principle and boast: “The end justifies the means”? 

The censorship law, therefore, is not a law, it is a police meas- 
ure; but it is a bad police measure, for it does not achieve what it 
intends, and it does not intend what it achieves. 

If the censorship law wants to prevent freedom as something 
objectionable, the result is precisely the opposite. In a country of 
censorship, every forbidden piece of printed matter, i.e., printed 
without being censored, is an event. It is considered a martyr, and 
there is no martyr without a halo and without believers. It 1s 
regarded as an exception, and if freedom can never cease to be of 
value to mankind, so much the more valuable is an exception to 
the general lack of freedom. Every mystery has its attraction. 
Where public opinion is a mystery to itself, it is won over from the 
outset by every piece of writing that formally breaks through the 
mystical barriers. The censorship makes every forbidden work, 
whether good or bad, into an extraordinary document, whereas 
freedom of the press deprives every written work of an externally 
imposing effect. 

If the censorship is honest in its intention, it would like to 
prevent arbitrariness, but it makes arbitrariness into a law. No 
danger that it can avert is greater than itself. The mortal danger 
for every being lies in losing itself. Hence lack of freedom is the 
real mortal danger for mankind. For the time being, leaving aside 
the moral consequences, bear in mind that you cannot enjoy the 
advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconve- 
niences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns! And what 
do you lose with a free press? 

The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, 
the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself, the eloquent link that 
connects the individual with the state and the world, the embodied 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 165 

culture that transforms material struggles into intellectual strug- 
gles and idealises their crude material form. It is a people’s frank 
confession to itself, and the redeeming power of confession is well 
known. It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself, 
and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom. It is the 
spirit of the state, which can be delivered into every cottage, cheaper 
than coal gas. It is all-sided, ubiquitous, omniscient. It is the 
ideal world which always wells up out of the real world and flows 
back into it with ever greater spiritual riches and renews its soul. 

In the course of our exposal we have shown that censorship and 
press law are as different as arbitrariness and freedom, as formal 
law and actual law. But what holds good of the essence, holds 
good also of the appearance. What rightly holds good of both, 
holds good also of their application. Just as a press law is different 
from a censorship law, so the judge's attitude to the press differs 
from the attitude of the censor. 

Of course, our speaker, whose eyes are fixed on the heavens, 
sees the earth far below him as a contemptible heap of dust, so 
that he has nothing to say about any flowers except that they are 
dusty. Here too, therefore, he sees only two measures which are 
equally arbitrary in their application, for arbitrariness is acting 
according to individual discretion, and the latter, he says, is 
inseparable from spiritual things, etc., etc. If the understanding of 
spiritual things is individual, how can one spiritual view be more 
right than another, the opinion of the censor more right than the 
opinion of the author? But we understand the speaker. It is 
notable that he goes out of his way to describe both censorship 
and press law as being without right in their application, in order 
to prove the right of the censorship, for since he knows everything 
in the world is imperfect, the only question for him is whether 
arbitrariness should be on the side of the people or on the side of 
the government. 

His mysticism turns into the licence of putting law and arbitrariness 
on the same level and seeing only a formal difference where moral 
and legal opposites are concerned, for his polemic is directed not 
against the press law, but against law in general. Or is there any law 
which is necessarily such that in every single case it must be applied 
as the legislator intended and all arbitrariness absolutely excluded? 
Incredible audacity is needed to call such a meaningless task the 
philosopher’s stone, since it could only be put forward by the most 
extreme ignorance. The law is universal. The case which has to be 
settled in accordance with the law is a particular case. To include 
the particular in the universal involves a judgment. The judgment 

is problematic. The law requires also a judge. If laws applied 
themselves, courts would be superfluous. 

But everything human is imperfect! Therefore, edite, bibitel * 
Why do you want judges, since judges are human? Why do you 
want laws, since laws can only be executed by human beings, and 
all human operations are imperfect? Submit yourselves then to the 
goodwill of your superiors! Rhenish justice, like that of Turkey, is 
imperfect! Therefore, edite, bibite! — 

What a difference there is between a judge and a censor! 

The censor has no law but his superiors. The judge has no 
superiors but the law. The judge, however, has the duty of inter- 
preting the law, as he understands it after conscientious exami- 
nation, in order to apply it in a particular case. The censor’s 
duty is to understand the law as officially interpreted for him in a 
particular case. The independent judge belongs neither to me nor 
to the government. The dependent censor is himself a govern- 
ment organ. In the case of the judge, there is involved at most the 
unreliability of an individual intellect, in the case of the censor the 
unreliability of an individual character. The judge has a definite 
press offence put before him; confronting the censor is the spirit 
of the press. The judge judges my act according to a definite law; 
the censor not only punishes the crime, he makes it. If I am 
brought before the court, I am accused of disobeying an existing 
law, and for a law to be violated it must indeed exist. Where there 
is no press law there is no law which can be violated by the press. 
The censorship does not accuse me of violating an existing law. It 
condemns my opinion because it is not the opinion of the censor 
and his superiors. My openly performed act, which is willing to 
submit itself to the world and its judgment, to the state and its 
law, has sentence passed on it by a hidden, purely negative power, 
which cannot give itself the form of law, which shuns the light of 
day, and which is not bound by any general principles. 

A censorship law is an impossibility because it seeks to punish not 
offences but opinions, because it cannot be anything but a formula 
for the censor, because no state has the courage to put in general 
legal terms what it can carry out in practice through the agency of 
the censor. For that reason, too, the operation of the censorship is 
entrusted not to the courts but to the police. 

Even if censorship were in fact the same thing as justice, in the 
first place this would remain a fact without being a necessity. But, 
further, freedom includes not only what my life is, but equally how 

* Eat, drink! (Words from a German student song.) — Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 167 

I live, not only that I do what is free, but also that I do it freely. 
Otherwise what difference would there be between an architect | 
and a beaver except that the beaver would be an architect with fur 
and the architect a beaver without fur? 

Our speaker returns superfluously once again to the effects of 
freedom of the press in the countries where it actually exists. Since 
we have already dwelt on this subject at length, we shall here only 
touch further on the French press. Apart from the fact that the 
defects of the French press are the defects of the French nation, 
we find that the evil is not where the speaker looks for it. The 
French press is not too free; it is not free enough. It is true that it 
is not subject to a spiritual censorship, but it is subject to a 
material censorship, in the shape of high money sureties. It 
operates materially precisely because it is taken out of its proper 
sphere and drawn into the sphere of large trade speculations. 
Moreover, large trade speculations are a matter for large towns. 
Hence the French press is concentrated at few points, and if a 
material force has a demoniac effect when concentrated at few 
points, why should this not apply to a spiritual force also? 

If, however, you are bent on judging freedom of the press not 
by its idea, but by its historical existence, why do you not look for 
it where it historically exists? Naturalists seek by experiment to 
reproduce a natural phenomenon in its purest conditions. You do 
not need to make any experiments. You find the natural phenom- 
enon of freedom of the press in North America in its purest, 
most natural form. But if there are great historical founda- 
tions for freedom of the press in North America, those founda- 
tions are still greater in Germany. The literature of a people, and 
the intellectual culture bound up with it, are indeed not only 
the direct historical foundations of the press, but are the lat- 
ter’s history itself. And what people in the world can boast of 
these most immediate historical foundations for freedom of the 
press more than the German people can? 

But, our speaker again breaks in, woe to Germany’s morals if its 
press were to become free, for freedom of the press produces “an 
inner demoralisation, which seeks to undermine faith in man’s 
higher purpose and thereby the basis of true civilisation”. 

It is the censored press that has a demoralising effect. Inseparable 
from it is the most powerful vice, hypocrisy, and from this, its 
basic vice, come all its other defects, which lack even the 
rudiments of virtue, and its vice of passivity, loathsome even from 
the aesthetic point of view. The government hears only its own 
voice, it knows that it hears only its own voice, yet it harbours the 

illusion that it hears the voice of the people, and it demands that 
the people, too, should itself harbour this illusion. For its part, 
therefore, the people sinks partly into political superstition, partly 
into political disbelief, or, completely turning away from political 
life, becomes a rabble of private individuals. 

Since the press daily praises the government-inspired creations 
in the way that God spoke of His Creations only on the Sixth day: 
“And, behold, it was very good”, and since, however, one day nec- 
essarily contradicts the other, the press lies continually and has to 
deny even any consciousness of lying, and must cast off all shame. 

Since the nation is forced to regard free writings as unlawful, it 
becomes accustomed to regard what is unlawful as free, freedom 
as unlawful and what is lawful as unfree. In this way censorship 
kills the state spirit. 

But our speaker is afraid of freedom of the press owing to his 
concern for “private persons”. He overlooks that censorship is a 
permanent attack on the rights of private persons, and still more 
on ideas. He grows passionate about the danger to individual 
persons, and ought we not to grow passionate about the danger 
threatening society as a whole? 

We cannot draw a sharper distinction between his view and ours 
than by contrasting his definitions of “bad frames of mind” to 
ours. 

A bad frame of mind, he says, is “pride, which recognises no 
authority in church and state”. And ought we not to regard as a 
bad frame of mind the refusal to recognise the authority of reason 
and law? 

“It is envy which preaches abolition of everything that the rabble calls 
aristocracy.” 

But we say, it is envy which wants to abolish the eternal 
aristocracy of human nature, freedom, an aristocracy about which 
even the rabble can have no doubt. 

“It is the malicious gloating which delights in personalities, whether lies or 

truth, and imperiously demands publicity so that no scandal of private life will 
remain hidden.” 

It is the malicious gloating which extracts tittle-tattle and 
personalities from the great life of the peoples, ignores historical 
reason and serves up to the public only the scandals of history; 
being quite incapable of judging the essence of a matter, it fastens 
on single aspects of a phenomenon and on individuals, and 
imperiously demands mystery so that every blot on public life will 
remain hidden. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 169 

“It is the impurity of the heart and imagination which is titillated by obscene 
pictures.” 

It is the impurity of the heart and imagination which is titillated 
by obscene pictures of the omnipotence of evil and the impotence 
of good, it is the imagination which takes pride in sin, it is the im- 
pure heart which conceals its secular arrogance in mystical images. 

“It is despair of one’s own salvation which seeks to stifle the voice of conscience 
by denial of God.” 

It is despair of one’s own salvation which makes personal weak- 
nesses into weaknesses of mankind, in order to rid one’s own con- 
science of them; it is despair of the salvation of mankind which pre- 
vents mankind from obeying its innate natural laws and preaches 
the necessity of immaturity; it is hypocrisy which shelters behind 
God without believing in His reality and in the omnipotence of 
the good; it is self-seeking which puts personal salvation above the 
salvation of all. 

These people doubt mankind in general but canonise individu- 
als. They draw a horrifying picture of human nature and at the 
same time demand that we should bow down before the holy 
image of certain privileged individuals. We know that man singly 
is weak, but we know also that the whole is strong. 

Finally, the speaker recalled the words proclaimed from the 
branches of the tree of knowledge for whose fruits we negotiate 
today as then: 

“Ye shall not surely die, in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be 
opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” 

Although we doubt that the speaker has eaten of the tree of 
knowledge, and that we (the Rhine Province Assembly of the 
Estates) then negotiated with the devil, about which at least Genesis 
tells us nothing, nevertheless we concur with the view of the 
speaker and merely remind him that the devil did not lie to us then, 
for God himself says: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to 
know good and evil.” 

We can reasonably let the speaker’s own words be the epilogue 
to this speech: 

“Writing and speaking are mechanical accomplishments.” 

However much our readers may be tired of these “mechanical 
accomplishments”, we must, for the sake of completeness, let the 
urban estate, after the princely and khightly estates, also give vent 
to its feelings against freedom of the press. We are faced here with 
the opposition of the bourgeois, not of the citoyen. 

The speaker from the urban estate believes that he joins Sieyés in 
making the philistine remark: 

“Freedom of the press is a fine thing, so long as bad persons do not meddle in it.” 

“Against that no proven remedy has yet been found”, etc., etc. 
_ The point of view which calls freedom of the press a thing 
deserves praise at least on account of its naivety. This speaker can 
be reproached with anything at all, but not with lack of sobriety or 
excess of imagination. 

So freedom of the press is a fine thing, and something which 
embellishes the sweet customary mode of life, a pleasant, worthy 
thing. But there are also bad persons, who misuse speech to tell 
lies, the brain to plot, the hands to steal, the feet to desert. Speech 
and thought, hands and feet would be fine things — good speech, 
pleasant thought, skilful hands, most excellent feet —if only there 
were no bad persons to misuse them! No remedy against that has 
yet been found. 

“Sympathy for the constitution and freedom of the press must necessarily be 
weakened when it is seen that they are bound up with eternally changeable 
conditions in that country” (France) “and with an alarming uncertainty about the 
future.” ; 

When for the first time the discovery in the science of the uni- 
verse was made that the earth is a mobile perpetuum, many a phleg- 
matic German must have taken a tight hold of his nightcap and 
sighed over the eternally changeable conditions of his Fatherland, 
and an alarming uncertainty about the future must have made 
him dislike a house that turned upside down at every moment. 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 139, May 19, 1842, Supplement] 

Freedom of the press is as little responsible for the “changeable 
conditions” as the astronomer’s telescope is for the unceasing 
motion of the universe. Evil astronomy! What a fine time that was 
when the earth, like a respectable townsman, still sat in the centre 
of the universe, calmly smoked its clay pipe, and did not even have 
to put on the light for itself, since the sun, moon and stars like so 
many obedient night lamps and “fine things” revolved around it. 

“He who never destroys what he has built, ever stands 
On this terrestrial world, which itself never stands still,” 
says Hariri, who is no Frenchman by birth, but an Arab.* 

The estate of the speaker finds expression very definitely in the 
thought: 

“The true, honest patriot is unable to suppress his feeling that constitution and 
freedom of the press exist not for the welfare of the people, but to satisfy the 
ambition of individuals and for the domination of parties.” 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 171 

It is well known that a certain kind of psychology explains big 
things by means of small causes and, correctly sensing that 
everything for which man struggles is a matter of his interest, 
arrives at the incorrect opinion that there are only “petty” 
interests, only the interests of a stereotyped self-seeking. Further, 
it is well known that this kind of psychology and knowledge of 
mankind is to be found particularly in towns, where moreover it is 
considered the sign of a clever mind to see through the world and 
perceive that behind the passing clouds of ideas and facts there 
are quite small, envious, intriguing manikins, who pull the strings 
setting everything in motion. However, it is equally well known 
that if one looks too closely into a glass, one bumps one’s own head, 
and hence these clever people’s knowledge of mankind and the 
universe is primarily a mystified bump of their own heads. 

Half-heartedness and indecision are also characteristic of the 
speaker’s estate. 

“His feeling of independence inclines him to favour freedom of the press” (in 

the sense of the mover of the motion), “but he must listen to the voice of reason 
and experience.” 

If the speaker had said in conclusion that while his reason 
disposed him in favour of freedom of the press his feeling of 
dependence set him against it, his speech would have been a 
perfect genre picture of urban reaction. 

‘He who has a tongue and does not speak, 

Who has a sword and does not fight, 
What is he indeed but a wretched wight?” 

We come now to the defenders of press freedom and begin with the 
main motion. We pass over the more general material, which is 
aptly and well expressed in the introductory words of the motion, 
in order at once to stress the peculiar and characteristic standpoint 
of this speech. 

The mover of the motion desires that freedom of the press should 
not be excluded from the general freedom to carry on a trade, a state 
of things that still prevails, and by which the inner contradiction 
appears as a classical example of inconsistency. 

“The work of arms and legs is free, but that of the brain is under tutelage. Of 
cleverer brains no doubt? God forbid, that does not come into question as far as 
the censors are concerned. To him whom God gives an official post, He gives also 
understanding!” 

The first thing that strikes one is to see freedom of the press 
included under freedom of trade. However, we cannot simply reject 
the speaker’s view. Rembrandt painted the Madonna as a Dutch 

peasant woman; why should our speaker not depict freedom in a 

form which is dear and familiar to him? 

No more can we deny that the speaker’s point of view has a 
certain relative truth. If the press itself is regarded merely as a 
trade, then, as a trade carried on by means of the brain, it 
deserves greater freedom than a trade carried on by means of 
arms and legs. The emancipation of arms and legs only becomes 
humanly significant through the emancipation of the brain, for it 
is well known that arms and legs become human arms and legs 
only because of the head which they serve. 

Therefore, however peculiar the speaker’s point of view may 
appear at first glance, we must absolutely prefer it to the empty, 
nebulous and blurry arguments of those German liberals who 
think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firma- 
ment of the imagination instead of on the solid ground of reality. 
It is in part to these exponents of the imagination, these 
sentimental enthusiasts, who shy away from any contact of their 
ideal with ordinary reality as a profanation, that we Germans owe 
the fact that freedom has remained until now a fantasy and 
sentimentality. 

Germans are in general inclined to sentiment and high-flown 
extravagance, they have a weakness for music of the blue sky. It is 
therefore gratifying when the great problem of the idea is 
demonstrated to them from a tough, real standpoint derived from 
the immediate environment. Germans are by nature most devoted, 
servile and respectful. Out of sheer respect for ideas they fail to 
realise them. They make the worship of them into a cult, but they 
do not cultivate them. Hence the way adopted by the speaker 
seems suitable for familiarising Germans with his ideas, for 
showing them that it is not a question here of something 
inaccessible to them, but of their immediate interests, suitable for 
translating the language of the gods into that of man. 

We know that the Greeks believed that in the Egyptian, Lydian 
and even Scythian gods they could recognise their Apollo, their 
Athena, their Zeus, and they disregarded the specific features of 
the foreign cults as subsidiary. It is no crime, therefore, if the 
German takes the goddess of freedom of the press, a goddess 
unknown to him, for one of his familiar goddesses, and according- 
ly calls it freedom of trade or freedom of property. 

Precisely because we are able to acknowledge and appreciate the 
speaker’s point of view, we criticise it the more severely. 

“One could very well imagine the continued existence of crafts side by side with 
freedom of the press, because trade based on brain work could require a higher 

Debates. on Freedom of the Press 173 

degree of skill, putting it on the same level as the seven free arts of old; but the 
continued unfreedom of the press alongside freedom of trade is a sin against the 
Holy Ghost.” 

Of course! The lower form of freedom is obviously considered to 
be without rights if the higher form has no rights. The right of the 
individual citizen is a folly if the right of the state is not recog- 
nised. If freedom in general is nghtful, it goes without saying 
that a particular form of freedom is the more rightful as freedom 
has achieved in it a finer and better-developed existence. If the polyp 
has a right to existence because the life of nature is at least dimly evi- 
dent in it, how much more so the lion, in which life rages and roars? 

However correct the conclusion that the existence of a higher 
form of right can be considered proved by the existence of a lower 
form, the application is wrong when it makes the lower sphere a 
measure of the higher and turns its laws, reasonable within their 
own limits, into caricatures by claiming that they are not laws of 
their own sphere, but of a higher one. It is as if I wanted to 
compel a giant to live in the house of a pigmy. 

Freedom of trade, freedom of property, of conscience, of the 
press, of the courts, are all species of one and the same genus, of 
freedom without any specific name. But it is quite incorrect to forget 
the difference because of the unity and to go so far as to make a 
particular species the measure, the standard, the sphere of other 
species. This is an intolerance on the part of one species of 
freedom, which is only prepared to tolerate the existence of others 
if they renounce themselves and declare themselves to be its vassals. 

Freedom of trade is precisely freedom of trade and no other 
freedom because within it the nature of the trade develops 
unhindered according to the inner rules of its life. Freedom of the 
courts is freedom of the courts if they follow their own inherent 
laws of right and not those of some other sphere, such as religion. 
Every particular sphere of freedom is the freedom of a particular 
sphere, just as every particular mode of life is the mode of life of 
a particular nature. How wrong it would be to demand that the 
lion should adapt himself to the laws of life of the polyp! How 
false would be my understanding of the interconnection and unity 
of the bodily organism if I were to conclude: since arms and legs 
function in their specific way, the eye and ear — organs which take 
man away from his individuality and make him the mirror and 
echo of the universe — must have a still greater right to activity, 
and consequently must be intensified arm-and-leg activity. 

As in the universe each planet, while turning on its own axis, 
moves only around the sun, so in the system of freedom each of 

its worlds, while turning on its own axis, revolves only around the 
central sun of freedom. To make freedom of the press a variety of 
freedom of trade is a defence that kills it before defending it, for 
do I not abolish the freedom of a particular character if I demand 
that it should be free in the manner of a different character? Your 
freedom is not my freedom, says the press to a trade. As you obey 
the laws of your sphere, so will I obey the laws of my sphere. To 
be free in your way is for me identical with being unfree, just as a 
cabinet-maker would hardly feel pleased if he demanded freedom 
for his craft and was given as equivalent the freedom of the 
philosopher. 

Let us lay bare the thought of the speaker. What is freedom? 
He replies: Freedom of trade, which is as if a student, when asked 
what is freedom, were to reply: It is freedom to be out at night. 

With as much right as freedom of the press, one could include 
every kind of freedom in freedom of trade. The judge practises 
the trade of law, the preacher that of religion, the father of a 
family that of bringing up children. But does that express the 
essence of legal, religious and moral freedom? 

One could also put it the other way round and call freedom of 
trade merely a variety of freedom of the press. Do craftsmen work 
only with hands and legs and not with the brain as well? Is the 
language of words the only language of thought? Is not the 
language of the mechanic through the steam-engine easily percep- 
tible to my ear, is not the language of the bed manufacturer very 
obvious to my back, that of the cook comprehensible to my 
stomach? Is it not a contradiction that all these varieties of free- 
dom of the press are permitted, the sole exception being the one 
that speaks to my intellect through the medium of printer’s ink? 

In order to defend, and even to understand, the freedom of a 
particular sphere, I must proceed from its essential character and 
not its external relations. But is the press true to its character, 
does it act in accordance with the nobility of its nature, is the press 
free which degrades itself to the level of a trade? The writer, of 
course, must earn in order to be able to live and write, but he 
must by no means live and write to earn. 

When Béranger sings: 

Je ne vis que pour faire des chansons, 

Si vous m’6tez ma place Monseigneur, 
Je ferai des chansons pour vivre, * 

* I live only to compose songs. 
If you dismiss me, Monseigneur, 
I shall compose songs in order to live.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 175 

this threat contains the ironic admission that the poet deserts his 
proper sphere when for him poetry becomes a means. 

The writer does not at all look on his work as a means. It is an 
end in itself; it is so little a means for him himself and for others 
that, if need be, he sacrifices his existence to its existence. He is, in 
another way, like the preacher of religion who adopts the 
principle: “Obey God rather than man”, including under man 
himself with his human needs and desires. On the other hand, 
what if a tailor from whom I had ordered a Parisian frock-coat 
were to come and bring me a Roman toga on the ground that it 
was more in keeping with the eternal law of beauty! 

The primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade. The writer 
who degrades the press into being a material means deserves as 
punishment for this internal unfreedom the external unfreedom 
of censorship, or rather his very existence is his punishment. 

Of course, the press exists also as a trade, but then it is not the 
affair of writers, but of printers and booksellers. However, we are 
concerned here not with the freedom of trade of printers and 
booksellers, but with freedom of the press. 

Indeed, our speaker does not stop at regarding the right to 
freedom of the press proved because of freedom of trade; he 
demands that freedom of the press, instead of being subject to its 
own laws, should be subject to the laws of freedom of trade. He 
even joins issue with the spokesman of the commission, who 
defends a higher view of freedom of the press, and he puts 
forward demands which can only produce a comic effect, for it 
becomes comic when the laws of a lower sphere are applied to a 
higher one, just as, conversely, it has a comic effect when children 
become passionate. 

“He speaks of authorised and unauthorised authors. He understands by this that 
even in the sphere of freedom of trade the exercise of a right that has been 
granted is always bound up with some condition which is more or less difficult to 
fulfil, depending on the occupation in question. Obviously, masons, carpenters and 

master builders have to fulfil conditions from which most other trades are 
exempt.” “His motion concerns a right in particular, not in general.” 

First of all, who is to grant authority? Kant would not have 
admitted Fichte’s authority as a philosopher, Ptolemy would not 
have admitted that Copernicus had authority as an astronomer, 
nor Bernard of Clairvaux Luther’s authority as a theologian. Every 
man of learning regards his critics as “unauthorised authors’. Or 
should the unlearned decide who should have the authority of a 
man of learning? Obviously the judgment would have to be left to 
the unauthorised authors, for the authorised cannot be judges in 

their own case. Or should authority be linked with estate? The 
cobbler Jakob Bohme was a great philosopher.* Many a philos- 
opher of repute is merely a great cobbler. 

By the way, when speaking of authorised or unauthorised 
authors, to be consistent one must not rest content with distin- 
guishing between individual persons, one must divide the press as a 
trade into various trades and draw up different trade certificates 
for the different spheres of literary activity. Or ought the author- 
ised writer to be able to write about everything? From the outset, 
the cobbler has more authority than the lawyer to write about 
leather. The day-labourer has just as much authority as the theolo- 
gian to write about whether one should work or not on holidays. 
If, therefore, authority is linked with special objective conditions, 
every citizen will be at one and the same time an authorised and 
an unauthorised writer, authorised in matters concerning his pro- 
fession, and unauthorised in all others. 

Apart from the fact that in this way the world of the press, 
instead of being a bond uniting the nation, would be a sure means 
of dividing it, that the difference between the estates would thus 
be fixed intellectually, and the history of literature would sink to 
the level of the natural history of the particular intelligent breeds 
of animals; apart from the disputes over the dividing lines 
between them and conflicts which could neither be settled nor 
avoided; apart from the fact that lack of talent and narrow-mind- 
edness would become a law for the press, for the particular can 
be seen intellectually and freely only in connection with the whole 
and therefore not in separation from it—apart from all this, since 
reading is as important as writing, there would have to be authorised 
and unauthorised readers, a consequence which was drawn in Egypt, 
where the priests, the authorised authors, were at the same time 
the sole authorised readers. And it is highly expedient that only 
the authorised authors should be given authority to buy and read 
their own works. 

What inconsistency! If privilege prevails, the government has 
every right to maintain that it is the sole authorised author as regards 
what it does or does not do. For if you consider yourself author- 
ised as a citizen to write not only about your particular estate, 
but about what is most general, viz., the state, should not other 
mortals, whom you wish to exclude, be authorised as human 
beings to pass judgment on a very particular matter, viz., your 
authority and your writings? 

3 Cf. H. Heine, Die romantische Schule, II, 3.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 177 

The result would be the comical contradiction that the authorised author 
might write without censorship about the state, but the unauthorised 
author might write about the authorised author only by permission of the 
censorship. 

Freedom of the press will certainly not be achieved by a crowd 
of official writers being recruited by you from your ranks. The 
authorised authors would be the official authors, the struggle between 
censorship and freedom of the press would be converted into a struggle 
between authorised and unauthorised writers. 

Hence a member of the fourth estate correctly replies to this: 

“If some restriction on the press must still exist, let it be equal for all parties, that 
is, that in this respect no one class of citizens is allowed more rights than another”. 

The censorship holds us all in subjection, just as under a 
despotic regime all are equal, if not in value, then in absence of 
value; that kind of freedom of the press seeks to introduce 
oligarchy in the sphere of intellectual life. The censorship declares 
that an author is at most inconvenient, unsuitable within the 
bounds of its realm. That kind of freedom of the press claims to 
anticipate world history, to know in advance the voice of the 
people, which hitherto has been the sole judge as to which writer 
has “authority” and which is “without authority”. Whereas Solon 
did not venture to judge a man until after his life was over, after his 
death, this view presumes to judge a writer even before his birth. 

The press is the most general way by which individuals can 
communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for per- 
sons, but only respect for intelligence. Do you want ability for 
intellectual communication to be determined officially by special 
external signs? What I cannot be for others, I am not and cannot 
be for myself. If I am not allowed to be a spiritual force for 
others, then I have no right to be a spiritual force for myself; and 
do you want to give certain individuals the privilege of being 
spiritual forces? Just as everyone learns to read and write, so 
everyone must have the right to read and write. 

For whom, then, is the division of writers into “authorised” and 
“unauthorised” intended? Obviously not for the truly authorised, 
for they can make their influence felt without that. Is it therefore 
for the “unauthorised” who want to protect themselves and 
impress others by means of an external privilege? 

Moreover, this palliative does not even make a press law 
unnecessary, for, as a speaker from the peasant estate remarks: 

“Cannot a privileged person, too, exceed his authority and be liable to 

punishment? Therefore, in any case, a press law would be necessary, with the result 
that one would encounter the same difficulties as with a general law on the press.” 

If the German looks back on his history, he will find one of the 
main reasons for his slow political development, as also for the 
wretched state of literature prior to Lessing, in the existence of 
“authorised writers’. The learned men by profession, guild or 
privilege, the doctors and others, the colourless university writers 
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their stiff 
pigtails and their distinguished pedantry and their petty hair-split- 
ting dissertations, interposed themselves between the people and 
the mind, between life and science, between freedom and man- 
kind. It was the unauthorised writers who created our literature. 
Gottsched and Lessing—there you have the choice between an 
“authorised” and “unauthorised” writer! 

In general, we have no liking for “freedom” that only holds 
good in the plural. England is a proof on a big historical scale how 
dangerous for “freedom” is the restricted horizon of “freedoms”. 

“Ce mot des libertés,” says Voltaire, “des priviléges, suppose l’assujettissement. 
Des libertés sont des exemptions de la servitude générale.” * 

Further, if our speaker wants to exclude anonymous and 
pseudonymous writers from freedom of the press and subject them 
to censorship, we would point out that in the press it is not the 
name that matters, but that, where a press law is in force, the 
publisher, and through him the anonymous and pseudonymous 
writer as well, is liable to prosecution in the courts. Moreover, 
when Adam gave names to all the animals in paradise, he forgot 
to give names to the German newspaper correspondents, and they 
will remain nameless in saecula saeculorum.” 

Whereas the mover of the motion sought to impose restrictions 
on persons, the subjects of the press, other estates want to restrict 
the objective material of the press, the scope of its operation and 
existence. The result is a soulless bargaining and haggling as to how 
much freedom freedom of the press ought to have. 

One estate wants to limit the press to discussing the material, 
intellectual and religious state of affairs in the Rhine Province; 
another wants the publication of “local newspapers”, whose title 
indicates their restricted content; a third even wants free expres- 
sion of opinion to be allowed in one newspaper only in each 
province!!! 

All these attempts remind one of the gymnastics teacher who 

* “This word of the liberties, of the privileges, supposes subjection. Liberties are 
exemptions from the general servitude.” — Ed. 
For ever and ever.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 179 

suggested that the best way to teach how to jump was to take 
the pupil to a big ditch and show him by means of a cotton thread 
how far he ought to jump across the ditch. Of course, the pupil 
had first to practise jumping and would not be allowed to clear 
the whole ditch on the first day, but from time to time the thread 
would be moved farther away. Unfortunately, during his first 
lesson the pupil fell into the ditch, and he has been lying there 
ever since. The teacher was a German and the pupil’s name was 

“freedom”. 
According to the average normal type, therefore, the defenders 

of freedom of the press in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly differ 
from their opponents not as regards content, but in their trend. The 
narrow-mindedness of a particular estate opposes the press in one 
case, and defends it in another; some want the government alone 
to have privileges, others want them to be shared among more 
persons; some want a full censorship, others a half censorship; 
some want three-eighths freedom of the press, others none at all. 
God save me from my friends! 

Completely at variance with the general spirit of the Assembly, 
however, are the speeches of the commission’s spokesman and those 
of some members of the peasant estate. 

Among other things, the spokesman declared: 

“In the life of peoples, as in that of individuals, it happens that the fetters of a 
too long tutelage become intolerable, that there is an urge for independence, and 
that everyone wants to be responsible himself for his actions. Thereupon the 
censorship has outlived its time; where it still exists it will be regarded as a hateful 
constraint which prohibits what is openly said from being written.” 

Write as you speak, and speak as you write, our primary 
schoolteachers taught us. Later what we are told is: say what has 
been prescribed for you, and write what you repeat after others. 

“Whenever the inevitable progress of time causes a new, important interest to 
develop and gives rise to a new need, for which no adequate provision is contained 
in the existing legislation, new laws are necessary to regulate this new state of society. 
Precisely such a case confronts us here.” 

That is the truly historical view in contrast to the illusory one 
which kills the reason of history in order subsequently to honour 
its bones as historical relics. 

“Of course, the problem” (of a press code) “may not be quite easy to solve; the 
first attempt that is made will perhaps remain very incomplete! But all states will 
owe a debt of gratitude to the legislator who is the first to take up this matter, and 
under a king like ours, it is perhaps the Prussian government that is destined to 
have the honour to precede other countries along this path, which alone can lead 
to the goal.” 

180 Rar Marx 

Our whole exposal has shown how isolated this courageous, 
dignified and resolute view was in the Assembly. This was also 
abundantly pointed out to the spokesman of the commission by 
the chairman himself. Finally, it was expressed also by a member 
of the peasant estate in an ill-humoured but excellent speech: 

“The speakers have gone round and round the question before us like a cat round hot 
porridge.” “The human spirit must develop freely in accordance with its inherent laws 
and be allowed to communicate its achievements, otherwise a clear, vitalising stream 
will become a pestiferous swamp. If any nation is suitable for freedom of the press 
it is surely the calm, good-natured German nation, which stands more in need of 
being roused from its torpor than of the strait jacket of censorship. For it not to be 
allowed freely to communicate its thoughts and feelings to its fellow men very 
much resembles the North American system of solitary confinement for criminals, 
which when rigidly enforced often leads to madness. From one who is not permitted 
to find fault, praise also is valueless; in absence of expression it is like a Chinese picture 
in which shade is lacking. Let us not find ourselves put in the same company as this 
enervated nation!” 

If we now look back on the press debates as a whole, we cannot 
overcome the dreary and uneasy impression produced by an assem- 
bly of representatives of the Rhine Province who wavered only be- 
tween the deliberate obduracy of privilege and the natural impotence 
of a half-hearted liberalism. Above all, we cannot help noting with 
displeasure the almost entire absence of general and broad points 
of view, as also the negligent superficiality with which the question 
of a free press was debated and disposed of. Once more, there- 
fore, we ask ourselves whether the press was a matter too remote 
from the Assembly of the Estates, and with which they had too 
little real contact, for them to be able to defend freedom of the 
press with the thorough and serious interest that was required? 

Freedom of the press presented its petition to the estates with 
the most subtle captatio benevolentiae.* 

At the very beginning of the Assembly session, a debate arose in 
which the chairman pointed out that the printing of the Assembly 
proceedings, like all other writings, was subject to censorship, but that 
in this case he took the place of the censor. 

On this one point, did not the question of freedom of the press 
coincide with that of freedom of the Assembly? The conflict here is 
the more interesting because the Assembly in its own person was 
given proof how the absence of freedom of the press makes all 
other freedoms illusory. One form of freedom governs another 
Just as one limb of the body does another. Whenever a particular 
freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question. 

* Attempt to arouse goodwill.— Ed. 

Debates on Freedom of the Press 18] 

Whenever one form of freedom is rejected, freedom in general is 
rejected and henceforth can have only a semblance of existence, 
since the sphere in which absence of freedom is dominant 
becomes a matter of pure chance. Absence of freedom is the rule 
and freedom an exception, a fortuitous and arbitrary occurrence. 
There can, therefore, be nothing wronger than to think that when 
it is a question of a particular form of existence of freedom, it is a 
particular question. It is the general question within a particular 
sphere. Freedom remains freedom whether it finds expression in 
printer’s ink, in property, in the conscience, or in a_ political 
assembly. But the loyal friend of freedom whose sense of honour 
would be offended by the mere fact that he had to vote on the ques- 
tion whether freedom was to be or not to be—this friend becomes 
perplexed when confronted with the peculiar material form in which 
freedom appears. He fails to recognise the genus in the species; 
because of the press, he forgets about freedom, he believes he is 
judging something whose essence is alien to him, and he condemns 
his own essence. Thus the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly con- 
demned itself by passing sentence on freedom of the press. 

The highly sage, practical bureaucrats who secretly and unjusti- | 
fiably think of themselves in the way that Pericles openly and rightly 
boasted of himself: “I am a man who is the equal of anyone both 
in knowing the needs of the state and in the art of expounding 
them” *— these hereditary leaseholders of political intelligence will 
shrug their shoulders and remark with oracular good breeding that 
the defenders of freedom of the press are wasting their efforts, for 
a mild censorship is better than a harsh freedom of the press. We 
reply to them with the words of the Spartans Sperthias and Bulis 
to the Persian satrap Hydarnes: 

“Hydarnes, you have not equally weighed each side in your advice to us. 
For you have tried the one which you advise, the other has remained untried by 
you. You know what it means to be a slave, but you have never yet tried freedom, 
to know whether it is sweet or not. For if you had tried it, you would have advised 
us to fight for it, not merely with spears, but also with axes.” 

132, 135 and 139, May 5, 8, 10, 12, time 

15 and 19, 1842