1On the cold sea at the edge of Prussia stood the town of Königsberg, with its castle, its seven bridges, and its university. In that town a harness-maker had a son named Immanuel Kant.
2The harness-maker was poor and upright. His wife could barely write, but she had a good mind and no one to tell her so. On clear evenings she took the boy out beyond the last houses, and showed him the stars, and told him the names she knew. She taught him never to say a thing he did not hold to be true. She died when he was thirteen, of a fever she caught nursing a friend. He was an old man before he could speak of her with a steady voice.
3He grew up small, with a sunken chest, and no one thought he would live long. He studied, and then lectured at the university for fifteen years without a salary, paid by the students a few coins a head. He was forty-six before they made him a professor. He never married. He never in his life went more than a few days' walk from the town where he was born.
4He kept his hours as a miser keeps gold. An old soldier named Lampe, his servant, woke him at five each morning with the same three words: "It is time." He lectured from seven until nine. He wrote until one. He dined, always with guests, and talked of everything but philosophy. At the same minute each afternoon he came out of his door in a grey coat, with a cane, and walked up and down under the lime trees, and Lampe followed with an umbrella if there were clouds. The housewives of Königsberg, it was said, set their clocks by the professor.
5Now there came to that university, in the last years of the professor's teaching, a young man named Lukas Brandt. He was the son of a smith on a nobleman's estate, three days' walk inland among the pine woods and the rye. And you must know what that meant.
6In that country the land was owned by lords, and the people who worked it were owned with it, or as near as made no difference. A man born on an estate was the lord's subject from his cradle. He could not leave without the lord's paper. He could not marry or learn a trade without the lord's leave. His children served in the lord's house and fields as a matter of course. It was not called slavery. The law had a longer word for it.
7Lukas had been quick at his letters, and the baron had noticed. The baron needed a man who could keep accounts in two languages and write to the grain merchants in Danzig. So he had paid for the boy's school, and then sent him to the university, as one sends a colt to be broken. When the colt was ready, it would come home to the stable.
8Lukas knew this. He had not much minded it. Then he went, in his second winter, to hear the old professor.
9The hall was cold and full before seven. A very small man came in, in a brown coat with yellow buttons, and stood at a low desk, and began to speak in a weak voice that somehow carried to the back wall. He had a habit of fixing his eyes on one student in the front row and saying the whole lecture to him. That morning it was Lukas.
10The professor was speaking of what a person is. He said that everything in the world of buying and selling has a price. A horse has a price; a field; a day's labour; a clever turn of the hand. Whatever has a price can be exchanged for something else of the same price. But a person, he said, is not of that kind. A person can think, and choose, and give the law to himself. Such a being has no price. Nothing can be set in the other pan of the scale. And so a person may never be used merely as a tool for another's ends, like a hammer taken up and put down.
11He said it without heat, as one states a rule of grammar. Lukas sat in the front row with his hands between his knees and felt the floor move.
12He began to read everything the old man had written. He found, in a monthly paper ten years old, a few pages he could follow, and one line of them he copied into the cover of his notebook: "Have courage to use your own understanding!"
13And he read, at the end of one of the hard books, a sentence about the two things that filled the professor with wonder the longer he thought on them: "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Lukas knew nothing then of a harness-maker's wife at the edge of town. But he understood that the small man had looked at the sky and looked into a person and had found the same thing in both places: a law that no one had put there by decree.
14In his third autumn two letters came to Königsberg within a week of each other. One was for the student. One was for the professor.
15The student's was from the baron's steward. Lukas was to come home at Martinmas. A place was ready for him in the estate office.
16The professor's letter bore the seal of the King of Prussia.
17The old king, Frederick, who had let men print what they pleased, was eight years dead. The new king was a different man. He was fearful, and given to visions, and ruled by a minister who had once been a preacher. Laws had come out against free writing on religion. And the professor, the year before, had published a book in which he asked what in religion could stand by reason alone.
18The letter said that the King had seen with great displeasure how the professor misused his philosophy to distort and belittle the chief teachings of Holy Scripture. It demanded an account. It ordered him to do no such thing again. And it said that if he continued, he must expect unpleasant measures.
19Everyone knew what those words meant. Other men had lost their chairs. He was seventy years old.
20He told almost no one. He went on waking at five. He walked under the lime trees at his minute. But old Lampe saw that the lamp in the study burned later than its hour, and that was a thing he had not seen in thirty years.
21Lukas, who knew nothing of the king's letter, came to him in that same week.
22A student did not lightly knock at that door. But the professor received young men on certain afternoons, and Lukas stood in the bare study, and told his case badly, and held out the steward's letter.
23The old man read it through an eyeglass. Then he asked questions, in order.
24"Did you give your word to this baron that you would serve him?"
25"No, sir. I was nine. My father gave thanks. I do not think anyone asked for a word."
26"What has he spent on you?"
27Lukas named the sum, as near as he knew it. School fees, six years. Board in the town. Books.
28"That is a debt," said the professor. "A debt is a real thing, and you must pay it, to the last groschen, with interest, however long it takes. What else does he claim?"
29"Me, sir."
30"On what ground?"
31"That I was born on his land."
32The old man was silent a while. He looked at the window. When he spoke, it was dry, and slow.
33"No one can be born owing himself," he said. "A child has done nothing yet for which he could be bound. That is my judgment, and I mean to print it one day, if I am let. But hear the other side, young man, for it will not please you. The law of this country says otherwise. And a bad law is not mended by each man tearing out the page he dislikes. It is mended by saying openly, to everyone who can read, that it is bad, and why, until it is changed. I cannot tell you to run away by night. I can tell you that you may stand in front of him and say what is true."
34"He can have me flogged," said Lukas. "He can give my name to the recruiting sergeant. Twenty years in a regiment."
35"He can," said the professor. "That is in his hand. What you say to him is in yours." And then, more gently: "I am sorry. It is all I have. I have found it to be a good deal."
36Lukas went out angry. He had hoped for a letter to some great person, or a purse. He had been given a rule of grammar.
37He did not know what the old man did that night. The professor sat down to answer his king.
38He weighed it as he had weighed everything in his life. He would not say that he had been wrong, for he did not believe it, and his mother had taught him about that. To take back what one holds true, in order to be left in peace, is a base thing. But was he bound to go on saying all that he thought, at every hour, in the teeth of a command? He judged that he was not. Everything a man says must be true. It does not follow that he must say every truth aloud, at once.
39So he wrote that he had not belittled religion, and showed why. And then he made a promise. He wrote that, as His Majesty's most faithful subject, he would henceforth refrain altogether from public discourse on religion, in lectures and in writing.
40He chose those words as a grinder chooses a lens. As His Majesty's most faithful subject. He bound himself to that king, for as long as he should be that king's subject. He did not bind himself beyond it. No one at court noticed. He folded the letter and went to bed, an hour late.
41Lukas walked home through the pine woods in the November rain. On the road a rumour reached him that the boldest pen in Germany had been told to be quiet, and had been quiet. It seemed to him all of a piece with the rule of grammar. He went up to the big house in his student's coat and asked to see the baron. And he stood on the good carpet and said what was true.
42He said that he owed the baron for his schooling, and named the sum, and laid on the table a paper promising to pay it with interest out of a schoolmaster's wages. He said that he would not hide, or run. He said that he asked for his release, because he was not a horse.
43The baron heard him out with his mouth open. Then he laughed, and then he shouted. He spoke of the sergeant. He spoke of the smith, Lukas's father, and the cottage the smith lived in at the baron's pleasure. Lukas stood there with his knees shaking, and did not take the paper back.
44He was not sent to the regiment. A baron needs a clerk who does not steal, and such clerks are few. He was put in the estate office at a desk by the stove, with a ledger, and told he would sit there until he came to his senses.
45He sat there for sixteen years.
46He kept the accounts honestly. On each quarter day he laid the same paper on the baron's table, and each time it was pushed back. But in the evenings, at his father's forge, when the fire was banked, he gathered the children of the estate, and he taught them their letters with a nail on a slate. By the end there was not a child on that land above eight years old who could not read.
47Three years after the two letters, the fearful king died. The old professor in Königsberg, who had kept his promise to the day, judged himself released from it by the terms in which it had been made. He printed the king's letter and his own answer for all to read. Then he printed everything he had been holding. Among it was a book on right and law, and in that book it stands that no one can be born into bondage, for no one can inherit a debt of his own person.
48Do not make him a spotless man. In his middle years he had written foolish and ugly things about the peoples of other lands, peoples he had never seen, ranking them like cattle at a fair. It was a closed door in a great house, and he did not know it was closed. But he was able to mend his own errors by his own rule. In his old age he wrote against the taking of other peoples' countries, and he called the sugar islands, where men were worked to death under the whip, the seat of the cruellest and most deliberate slavery. He had followed his own grammar to its end at last: if no person has a price, then there are none who may be bought.
49He died in his eightieth year, in the town where he was born. On the wall by his grave, long after, they set the sentence about the stars and the law.
50And three years after that, when Prussia had been broken in war and had to be built again, the new king's ministers wrote an edict. It declared that from a named day there should be only free people in the Prussian lands. Some of the men who drafted it had sat as students on the cold benches at seven in the morning, and had been looked at by a small man in a brown coat.
51When that day came, Lukas Brandt took his paper from the baron's table for the last time, and tore it across, and left the money it promised in a bag in its place. He walked out through the estate gate in daylight. He was not young. Behind him were some forty men and women who could read the edict for themselves, and did not need the pastor or the steward to tell them what it said.
52He had been angry once, at being handed only a rule. He understood it now. The old man had possessed nothing else to give, and neither had he, and it had been enough to wear down a wall.
53But there were walls in the world then that were thicker than the walls of Prussia, and people behind them who could not wait sixteen years. The professor had named the sugar islands. Now hear from one who was sold there.