The word freedom, however, must not suffer a wrong interpretation. Freedom needs to recognize its own proper limits, and it will do so in any properly organized social system. Such a measure as the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of liquor is not paternalism. It is merely the protection of the individual by the group. The only freedom which any man, good or bad, can justly claim is the freedom which ends at the point of injury to another. No one has any right to deny such a measure of liberty to any man. No one has the right to claim any measure of liberty beyond it. The reformers so often accused of efforts at paternalism have really had no thought of limiting the freedom of any one beyond this line of democratic necessity. They have not been looking at the question from that angle. They have been thinking neither of liberty nor of the lack of it. Their consideration has not been so much the imagined rights of the sinning as it has been the real rights of those sinned against. The limit to freedom which prohibition implies is only one which should have been set long ago by the reasonable thinking of amiable humanity. It is a rather pitiful fact that it became necessary to have laws to do what the rational conscience had failed to do. The fact that the innocent have been protected against a man and that he has been protected against himself gives him no right to insist that his liberties have been unjustly curtailed. He has only been aided in the interpretation of liberty in such a way as to be able to see that it belongs to others as well as to himself. Those who have braved the storm of misjudgment and abuse, so often the portion of one who tries to be true to a great trust, did not seek the destruction of any business nor the poverty of any class of men. The thought which spurred them on was that of cheerless firesides, of hungry stomachs, of shivering bodies, of dwarfed and neglected lives, and of the threatened blight of a nation. It was not a question of paternalism. It was one of protection. When the nation has banished the saloon from its every nook and corner, as it will soon do, no one can justly say that ours has become a paternalistic government. Our government will simply have taken a forward step in the fundamental task of any government—the service and protection of its people. When one finds another with a bottle of poison to his lips or with a gun to his temple, no one calls him a meddler for striking the threatening menace to the ground. In prohibition legislation, the national government will only have stricken aside the weapon in time to preserve many a man from destruction. Unborn generations will thus be saved from a curse which has long hounded the human race. Vibration as a Basis of Invention (1919)