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

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

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

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

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