ve boy, make a slide in the public street in frosty weather, unless
I am prepared--as the small boy usually is--to run the gauntlet of the
police. In a thousand ways my freedom, or what I call my freedom, is
interfered with: it is the price which I pay for being one item of a
social organism and for being in turn protected against others, who, in
virtue of that protection, are in their turn deprived of what they might
call their liberty.

No one can have failed to observe that this interference with personal
liberty becomes greater day by day. It is a tendency of modern
governments, based presumably upon increased experience, to increase
these protective regulations. Thus we have laws against adulteration of
food, against the placing of buildings concerned with obnoxious trades
in positions where people will be inconvenienced by them. We make
persons suffering from infectious diseases isolate themselves, and if
they cannot do this at home, we make them go to the fever hospital.
Further, we insist upon the doctor, whose position resembles that of a
confessor, breaking his obligation of professional secrecy and informing
the authorities as to the illness of his patient. We interfere with the
liberty of men and women to work as long as they like or to make their
children labour for excessive hours. We insist upon dangerous machinery
being fenced in. In a thousand ways we--the State--interfere with the
liberty of our fellows. Finally, when the needs of the community are
most pressing we interfere most with the freedom of the subject. Thus,
in these islands, we were recently living under a Defence of the Realm
Act--with which no reasonable person quarrelled. Yet it forbad many
things not only harmless in themselves but habitually permitted in times
of peace. We were subject to penalties if we showed lighted windows:
they must be shuttered or provided with heavy curtains. We might not
travel in railway carriages at night with the blinds undrawn. The papers
might not publish, nor we say in public, things which in time of peace
would go unnoticed. There were a host of other matters to which allusion
need not be made. Enough has been said to show that the State has and
exerts the right to control the actions of those who belong to it, and
that in time of stress it can and does very greatly intensify that
control and does so without arousing any real or widespread discontent.
Of course we all grumble, but then everybody, except it