ct that injustice by leaping out of a skyscraper window
and flapping his arms vigorously will find that overt defiance of the
Law of Gravity brings very serious penalties indeed. The wise man seeks
the loopholes in the law, and loopholes are caused by other laws which
counteract--_not defy!_--the given law. A balloon full of hydrogen
"falls up" in obedience to the Law of Gravity. A contradiction? A
paradox? No. It is the Law of Gravity which causes the density and
pressure of a planet's atmosphere to decrease with altitude, and that
decrease in pressure forces the balloon upwards until the balance point
between atmospheric density and the internal density of the balloon is
reached.

The illustration may seem obvious and elementary to the modern man, but
it seems so only because he understands, at least to some extent, the
laws involved. It was not obvious to even the most learned man of, say,
the Thirteenth Century.

* * * * *

Slavery, too, has its laws, and it is as dangerous to defy the laws of
a society as it is to defy those of nature, and the only way to escape
the punishment resulting from those laws is to find the loopholes. One
of the most basic laws of any society is so basic that it is never,
_ever_ written down.

And that law, like all basic laws, is so simple in expression and so
obvious in application that any man above the moron level has an
intuitive grasp of it. It is the first law one learns as a child.

_Thou shall not suffer thyself to be caught._

The unthinking man believes that this basic law can be applied by
breaking the laws of his society in secret. What he fails to see is
that such lawbreaking requires such a fantastic network of lies,
subterfuges, evasions, and chicanery that the structure itself
eventually breaks down and his guilt is obvious to all. The very steps
he has taken to keep from getting caught eventually become signposts
that point unerringly at the lawbreaker himself.

Like the loopholes in the law of gravity, the loopholes in the laws of
society can not entail a _defiance_ of the law. Only compliance with
those laws will be ultimately successful.

The wise man works within the framework of the law--not only the
written, but the unwritten law--of his society. In a slave society, any
slave who openly rebels will find that he gets squashed pretty quickly.
But many a slave-owner has danced willingly to the tune of a slave who
was