all its resources for military purposes. It retains its capacity to demobilize any time it likes, to lay aside its arms, to pension off its drill sergeants, and to return to the paths of pacificism whenever it seems safe to do so. FOOTNOTE: [30] Seeley: _op. cit._, p. 114. V. LIBERTY AS ABSENCE OF RESTRAINT It cannot be denied, however, that compulsory military service does interfere with the power of the _individual_ to do as he likes. He is forced, whether he wants to or not, to undergo certain discipline in time of peace, and to face uncertain danger in time of war. National service, then, is a restriction of his liberty, if by liberty is meant the absence of all restraint. Now this is precisely the sense in which the term is most frequently used. "Quid est libertas?" (What is liberty?), asked Cicero, and he replied: "Potestas vivendi ut velis" (The power of living as you like).[31] "Freedom," said Sir Robert Filmer, "is the liberty for everyone to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws."[32] Even Locke, Filmer's great opponent, admitted that "the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth." But who is the man who possesses this unlimited natural liberty to live as he likes, and to act as he pleases, subject to no superior power on earth? He is either a Robinson Crusoe, existing alone on a desert island, or he is an anarchist living in the midst of anarchists, and acknowledging no civil government whatsoever. In the latter case his career is likely to be as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" as that of the primitive savage depicted by Hobbes. For if one man is free to live as he likes, subject to no superior power, so are all. Hence in such a society of absolute freemen, human law is totally abrogated, no life is protected, no property safeguarded. Everyone, so far as his power avails, does what he pleases, takes what he covets, slays whom he hates. When his power ceases to avail, that is when a stronger than he appears upon the scene, he is himself liable to be despoiled and killed. Such is the state of society in which absolute liberty obtains. It is a chaos of incessant civil war, where "every man is enemy to every man." Its unfortunate victims, the possessors of unrestricted liberty, find that there is War among them, and despair Within them, raging without truce or term.[33]