If we reject a view which, like that just considered, seeks to dissolve the reality of the individual into the society of which he is a part, what are we left with as the pattern within which a man seeks freedom? Let us try to draw a picture of the place of man in a community like our own. He finds himself involved in a complex of relationships out of which he must form such a pattern of conduct as will give him happiness. There are his family, his friends, the church to which he may belong, his voluntary association, trade union, or employers’ association or whatever it may be, and there is the state. All of these, save the state, he may in greater or less degree avoid. A man may cut himself off from family or friends; he may refuse membership of a church or vocational body; he cannot refuse membership of the state. Somewhere or other, he encounters it as a body of persons issuing orders, and he is involved in the problem of deciding whether or no he will obey those orders. Every order issued is, in a final analysis, issued by a person or persons to another person or persons. When we say that, in such a complex of relationships as this, that a man is free, what do we mean? We know that if his Church issues an order to him of which he disapproves, he can leave his church; so, too, with all other bodies save the state. The latter can, if he seeks evasion of its commands, use compulsion to secure obedience to its orders. It makes, we say, the law, and a member of the state is legally compelled to obey the law. But he is not free merely because he obeys the law. His freedom, in relation to the law, depends on the effect of any particular order upon his experience. He is seeking happiness; some order seems to him a wanton invasion of that happiness. He may be right or wrong in so thinking; the point of fact is that he has no alternative but to go by his own moral certainties. Now freedom exists in a state where a man knows that the decisions made by the ultimate authority do not invade his personality. The conditions of freedom are then those which assure the absence of such invasion. The citizen who asks for freedom is entitled to the conditions which, collectively, are the guarantees that he will be able to go on the road to his happiness, as he conceives it, unhindered. Neither conditions nor guarantees will ever be perfect; nor will they ever cover all upon which happiness depends. The state, for instance, may say that I may marry the woman I love; it cannot say that she will marry me if I so desire. The freedom it secures to me is the absence of a barrier in the way of marriage if I can win her consent.