Apparently the assumption underlying the authoritarian position is that human nature is incurably anarchic, that it is its instinctive tendency to be wayward and disruptive, and that there is no remedy for this state of things except that of putting it in a cage, of surrounding it with a fine mesh of arrests, checks and restraints. This view may owe something of its modern strength to the theological doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—a dogma no longer held by sane people. We know that if we do hold a doctrine of original sin it must be held together with the no less true doctrine of original goodness. But the authoritarian is theologically orthodox; man to him is a born rebel, a natural anarchist; he holds that he is organically antisocial; and there is therefore nothing to do with him but to treat him like a wild animal and put him behind bars. It is of course possible to subdue anarchy in this way, and to produce some kind of order—for a time. But it should be observed that what happens is that liberty is not so much disciplined as denied; and as it appears to be the inherent, and incurable tendency of authority to feed upon itself and to grow fat, the natural consequence is the progressive destruction of liberty. The historical reaction from the excess of authority is a violent revulsion to wild and bloody anarchy; and over against authority, the only hope of liberty is to divide and to keep it divided. As a matter of fact in democratic communities, there is a curious discrepancy between theory and practice; and—somewhat unusually—our practice is better than our theory. The mediæval doctrine of authority still haunts our political and social thinking; but there are few people in a democratic community who behave themselves only when and because there is a policeman about. The whole structure of law (of which the policeman is the symbol) rests upon the proposition that it is possible to define and to enforce those moral obligations which are essential to the cohesion and the order of the community, those things which members of a society must do or abstain from doing if the society is to hold together at all. Law does not do more than state the lowest common terms of social duty. It does not cover “the whole duty of man.” The maximum of legal obligation is the minimum of moral obligation. That is why the law does not touch ordinary folk—except, of course, in formal adjustments of affairs of business or property. In the region of personal conduct, law is for decent folk in normal times a pure irrelevancy. We not only keep the law but we to some degree transcend it, and we do so without thinking about it. The policeman has no terrors for us because we do not approach his frontiers; and he has terrors only for the wilful social misfit whose native anarchy is still untamed. Law, that is, imposes the discipline of social justice only upon the exceptional case, the individual who is contemptuous or negligent of his social duty.