ng alone on a desert island, or he is an anarchist living in the
midst of anarchists, and acknowledging no civil government whatsoever.
In the latter case his career is likely to be as "poor, nasty, brutish,
and short" as that of the primitive savage depicted by Hobbes. For if
one man is free to live as he likes, subject to no superior power, so
are all. Hence in such a society of absolute freemen, human law is
totally abrogated, no life is protected, no property safeguarded.
Everyone, so far as his power avails, does what he pleases, takes what
he covets, slays whom he hates. When his power ceases to avail, that is
when a stronger than he appears upon the scene, he is himself liable to
be despoiled and killed. Such is the state of society in which absolute
liberty obtains. It is a chaos of incessant civil war, where "every man
is enemy to every man." Its unfortunate victims, the possessors of
unrestricted liberty, find that there is

War among them, and despair
Within them, raging without truce or term.[33]

It is from this intolerable condition of perfect freedom that
government saves a man. But it saves him--and in no other way can it
possibly do so--by taking away from both himself and his fellows alike
and in equal measure, part of their insufferable birthright of liberty.
The very essence of government is restriction, compulsion, law. Under
government, then, whatever may be its form, no man is free in the sense
of being exempt from restraint. Natural liberty gives place in organized
society to civil liberty, which is a much more modest and limited thing.
"Civil liberty," says Blackstone, "is no other than natural liberty so
far restrained by human laws as is necessary and expedient for the
general advantage of the public."[34] In the same sense Austin defines
it as "the liberty from legal obligation which is left or granted by a
sovereign government to any of its own subjects."[35] But the most
luminous definition is that of Montesquieu, who says: "La liberte est
le droit de faire tout ce que les lois permettent."[36] Those who would
understand what true civil or political liberty is, and what are its
necessary limitations, should imprint this profound utterance upon their
memories, and employ it as a universal test of sound thinking on the
subject.

"Liberty is the right to do all that the laws allow"--no more, and no
less. Liberty, then, in the sphere of politics, is not the absence of
all restr