For consider, once more, the historic record. The Roman suppression of Christianity was built upon the belief that unity of religious belief is the necessary condition of citizenship; later experience shows that view to be without any substance. What in fact emerges from the history of religious persecution is the lesson that the unity made by the suppression of Nonconformity is the unity of stagnation. That was the history of France under the repeal of the Edict of Nantes; it has been the history of Spain ever since the sixteenth century; it is, indeed, the history of any community, however rich and powerful, the rulers of which assume that they know what constitute truth and right, what opinions, therefore, they are entitled to prescribe. Any government which attacks a body organized to promote some set of opinions which may become dangerous to its safety may fairly be presumed to have something to conceal. It is co-ordinating social life not to the end of its greater fullness, but simply for the sake of co-ordination. But law, as I have insisted earlier, does not exist for the sake of law. It is not entitled to obedience because it is legal, because, that is, it proceeds from a source of reference formally competent to enact it. Law exists for what it does; and its rightness is made by the attitude adopted to it by those whose lives it proposes to shape. Since bodies like the Communist Party are in fact an announcement that some lives at least are shaped inadequately by the laws of a régime like our own, suppression seems to me an indefensible way of meeting that announcement. Force is never a reply to argument; and until argument itself seeks force as the expression of its principle, it is only by argument that it can justifiably be countered. VI I turn to a very different phase of the subject. In every society there are modes of conduct which, though not in themselves harmful, offer an easy prospect of becoming so. It is therefore assumed by many that it is the business of the state actively to discourage such conduct, even to the point, if necessary, of making its most innocuous expression illegal. No one is harmed, for instance, by a moderate indulgence in alcoholic liquor; but since drunkenness is harmful both to the individual and society, the state, it is said, is justified in prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic liquor. The same principle is urged of noxious drugs, of the use of tobacco, of gambling. Sometimes, indeed, the principle is carried to an extreme point and it is said that the state may prohibit any form of conduct, Sunday games, for example, which a majority of the society finds obnoxious. The claim to freedom, it is urged, may be denied in the interest of a social view of good.