In these pages, I have taken the view that liberty means that there is no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. There is no liberty without freedom of speech. There is no liberty if special privilege restricts the franchise to a portion of the community. There is no liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds for the control. For, as I have argued, since each man’s experience is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance himself; he can never be free save as he is able to act upon his own private sense of that interpretation. Unfreedom means to him a denial of his experience, a refusal on the part of organized society to satisfy what he cannot help taking to be the lesson of his life. But no man, of course, stands alone. He lives with others and in others. His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behaviour upon all of us lest conflict destroy peace. That imposition, broadly speaking, is essential to liberty since it makes for peace; and peace is the condition of continuity of liberty. The prohibitions, therefore, that are imposed are an attempt to extract from the experience of society certain principles of action by which, in their own interest, men ought to be bound. We cannot, indeed, say that all the principles a given government imposes are those it ought to impose. We can only say that some principles, by being imposed, are bound up with the very heart of freedom. That is the paradox of self-government. Certain restraints upon freedom add to a man’s happiness. Partly, they save him from the difficulty of going back to first principles for every step he has to take; they summarize for him the past experience of the community. Partly, also, they prevent every opposition of desire from resulting in conflict; they thus assure him of security. In a sense, he is like a traveller who reaches a sign-post pointing in many directions. Law helps him by telling him where one, at least, will lead; and it invites him to assume that its direction is also, or should be, his destination. Clearly this will not always be the case. For it to be so, the end of the law must be his as well, its experience must not contradict his own. For that contradiction, as a rule, means punishment for him since, at the end of the road he takes, if it is not the path of the law, he will find a policeman waiting for him. We must, that is to say, find ways of maximizing our agreement with the law.