PATTERNS FOR LIVING TOGETHER 117 



Singh of sovereignty as conceived by Austin. He was absolutely 

 despotic. Except occasionally on his wild frontier he kept the 

 most perfect order. He could have commanded anything j the 

 smallest disobedience to his commands would have been fol- 

 lowed by death or mutilation j and this was perfectly well known 

 to the enormous majority of his subjects. Yet I doubt whether 

 once in all his life he issued a command which Austin would call 

 a law. He took as his revenue a prodigious share of the produce 

 of the soil. He harried villages which recalcitrated at his exac- 

 tions, and he executed great numbers of men. He levied great 

 armies j he had all material of power, and he exercised it in 

 various ways. But he never made a law. The rules which regu- 

 lated the lives of his subjects were derived from their im- 

 memorial usages, and those rules were administered by domestic 

 tribunals in families or village communities — that is, in groups 

 no larger or little larger than those to which the application of 

 Austin's principles cannot be effected on his own admission 

 without absurdity." 



It is just such "rules derived from immemorial usage" that 

 constitute the primitive pattern and foundation of all social 

 organization, and also of enduring government. But obviously 

 as the numbers of men increased, and the average distance apart 

 of human beings from each other got steadily smaller, the whole 

 business of living became more complicated. There had to be 

 more and more rules. The rules got steadily more complicated 

 and difficult to administer, until now we have reached a situation 

 in which not only such avowed dictators as Mussolini and Hitler, 

 but even our own Thurman W. Arnold, professor of law in Yale 

 University — an institution steeped in the authentic juices of 

 liberty if ever there was one — advocate as the ideal government 

 one by men instead of one by principles. There could be no 

 franker return to the position of John Austin, nor more convinc- 

 ing evidence that old patterns of human sociality solidly 

 grounded in mammalian biology have gone sadly awry as the 

 difficulties and complexities of living together have grown along 

 with the stupendous increases in population density that have 



