G. W. Pierson, of Yale, points out that the ideas and the devices for our
universities, in the main, came from abroad. And he notes that the
period from 1815 to 1876 was the era of what he termed "the great
German influence. " You will observe that these were the years in which
were founded the schools in Baltimore and College Park which sub-
sequently were consolidated into the University of Maryland—the Col-
lege of Medicine of Maryland in 1807, the Maryland Agricultural
College in 1856, the School of Dentistry in 1840, the School of Pharmacy
in 1871, and so on. The German example of the free university, Dr.
Pierson says, was the most important of these influences from abroad.
And he described it as an institution where students could study when
and what they pleased, and where the professors seemed to be free to
teach and to investigate, to lecture, to conduct seminars, publish and
compete with each other in the search for new knowledge. What we
are doing here, then, might be described as the rebound of a force that
was set in motion here a century ago. We may hope that what has come
back is as good as what was sent.

But I have no more than a moderate interest in this single episode of
history. Its significance, from my point of view, is that it exemplifies
what Mr. Justice Holmes termed "the free trade in ideas. " Our civiliza-
tion is built on this competition of thought in a common market place,
for, as Mr. Justice Holmes noted, the best test of truth is the power of
the thought to get itself accepted in such competition. We in America
have borrowed much from Europe and elsewhere in the erection of our
State and our society. Ours is a government of laws, we say with pride,
and we do not forget that the very basis of this government is the com-
mon law we inherited from the English.

Our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights echo the
spirit of the great enlightenment of the eighteenth century, applying the
ideas and principles of men like Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and
the others. This does not mean that the statesmen who drafted these
great documents were slavish imitators lacking the powers of creative-
ness.

The English, the French, the Germans from whom we borrowed,
themselves had borrowed from the Romans. And the Romans, in turn,
had taken from the Greeks, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians and
the Babylonians, and so on into the obscurity of history. The civilization
we have today is a proliferation of the civilizations of the past—a dis-
tillation of the thoughts that were sound enough to survive the com-
petition of the market place....

It is deplorable that as men, we have pushed ahead so far in science,

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