 I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view in my judgment will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism. I well know that for those in free Berlin, the persistent communist pressure has been a source of peril and anguish. Yet what has happened in Berlin is that the Soviet Union has reacted to the initiatives of democracy, to you and to your spirit, and to that series of actions beginning with the Marshall Plan, which have brought about the extraordinary political, economic, and cultural renaissance of Western Europe. The post-war revival of democratic Europe has exerted a magnetic attraction on communist Europe. On the dark side of the iron curtain, despite rigid communist controls, democratic ideas, democratic techniques, democratic fashions, and democratic ideals are stirring. Among its own intellectuals and its own youth, communism finds itself on the defensive. The flow of influence is now always from west to east, not from east to west, from democracy to communism, not from communism to democracy. Because the flow of influence goes one way, the flow of people goes the other. This surely is the meaning of the Berlin Wall, that ugly mass of concrete brick and barbed wire which lies across the heart of your city like a medieval instrument of torture. For the people of Berlin, the erection of that wall was of course an affront and a source of anguish. But I can report to you from around the world, from my travels through Asia, that the Berlin Wall is regarded everywhere as a proof of communist bankruptcy and a symbol of communist failure. Herr Ulbricht himself has confessed that it was to stop the flight of people, to lock up his workers in the workers' paradise that the wall was built. For the first time in the history of mankind, a political system has had to construct a barrier to keep its people in and the whole world recognizes the desperate meaning of this act. They walled their people in, we set our people free, forced to read from his poetry at the inauguration of our president, once wrote these lines. Before I built a wall, I'd asked to know what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was like to give a fence, something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down. What wants this wall down is the whole free spirit of man. The statistics on the flight of scholars offers us an idea of what communism has done to this free spirit. Since 1958, a total of 1,606 scholars mainly teaches in the humanities and sciences at long established universities and technical institutes in East Germany have left the Eastern zone and registered in West German reception camps. More than half are members of faculties. 118 of them are full fledged professors, a number equal to the professional component of East Germany's third largest university at HALA. In the last four years, HALA has lost a total of 147 faculty members, more than the current size of its teaching staff. Humboldt University has lost 275 members of its staff in Leipzig 199 and so on down the list. As a chief law officer of the American government, I am particularly interested to know too the flight of many judges and lawyers from East Germany. The wall is more than a demonstration of communist failure in the struggle for men's faith and hope. It is equally a desperate effort to stem the tide of unification in democratic Europe. By attempting to isolate West Berlin, the communists hope to subtract West Berlin from West Germany and then to separate West Germany from Western Europe. And by subtracting West Germany from Western Europe, they hope to defeat and wreck the great cooperative instrumentalities of the regathering of democratic strength, the common market, the OECD and NATO. I can assure you that the wall will fail as spectacularly in this purpose as it has failed to seal off communist Europe from the magnetic attraction of democratic Europe. Ernst Reuter said a dozen years ago, here in Berlin, all the slogans that rend the air during the east-west struggle take on a real meaning. Here no one needs any professional lectures about democracy, about freedom and all the nice things that there are in the world. Here one has lived all of that. One lives it every day and every hour. You live it still in free Berlin and the ever-increasing strength and purpose and unity of the democracies will vindicate your struggle. And while today Berlin is divided, as Germany is divided, by the decision of the communists, you know and I know that in the end, all Berlin and all Germany are one. My country shares with you the peaceful but persistent purpose that Germans shall one day find themselves reunited. This is the true path toward lower tensions and lessened dangers. We shall continue to hope that as policies of repression fail and as fears of revenge prove unfounded, the Soviet government in its own true interest will come to share this purpose and to cooperate in its realization. But freedom by itself is not enough. Freedom is a good horse, said Matthew Arnold, but a horse to ride somewhere. Ernst Reuter knew that what mattered finally was the use to which man put freedom. That what counts is how liberty becomes the means of opportunity, growth and justice. We do not stand here at Berlin just because we are against communism. We stand here because we have a positive and progressive vision of the possibilities of a free society. Because we see in freedom the instrumentality of social progress and social justice. Because communism itself is but the symptom and the consequences of the fundamental evil, ignorance, disease, hunger and want, and freedom has shown mankind the most effective way to destroy these ancient antagonists. The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means. It assumes that peoples and nations will often think differently, have the full right to do so, and that diversity is the source of progress. It believes that men advance by discussion, by debate, by trial and by error. It believes that the best ideas come not from edict and ideology, but from free inquiry and from free experiment. And it regards dissent not as treason to the state, but as a tested mechanism of social progress. It knows that diverse nations will find diverse roles to the general goal of political independence and economic growth. It regards the free individual as a source of creativity and believes that it is the role of the state to serve him and not his role to serve the state. I come to Berlin from thousands of miles of travel through Asia. I have seen men and women at work building modern societies so that their people can begin to share in the blessings of science and technology and become full members of the 20th century. Social progress and social justice, in my judgment, are not something apart from freedom. They are the fulfillment of freedom. The obligations of free men is to use their opportunities to improve the welfare of their fellow human beings. This at least has been the tradition of democratic freedom in America. And this is what lies behind the great democratic effort underway in the United States now, known as the New Frontier.