PATTERNS FOR LIVING TOGETHER 121 



exception to the general rule that intimidation is a usual, and 

 indeed necessary, element in the maintenance of autocratic or 

 oligarchic patterns of sociality wherever found. But intimidation 

 by jorce majeure has two fundamental defects as a social agent. 

 In the first place, with human beings constituted as they are, 

 it is a lot of trouble to keep up. The despot and his gang get 

 careless and inattentive, and lax about cracking the whip. The 

 strain involved in being a pompous bogey-man gets wearisome. 

 In the second place, fear is a curable and largely self-limited 

 disease. The steady advance of man's knowledge through science 

 about how to control and alter to his use and benefit his environ- 

 ment and the inherently awesome forces of nature, have been 

 the great curative agents for the fear disease in all its varied 

 manifestations. Organized religion has learned this lesson well. 

 The "wrath of God" scares few folks these days. The "might 

 of rulers" scares them only temporarily. Even that quintes- 

 sentially timid fellow, the American businessman, seems now 

 slightly less afraid of Tommy the Cork than he was a while back. 

 The struggle of man to make his general pattern of sociality — 

 government by law — a stable, enduring, and satisfactory one has 

 been long and arduous. It has encountered many difficulties. 

 But there can be no question, I think, that its spiritual goal 

 all along the way has been that ideal of democracy well stated 

 by Harold J. Laski as one that is based on the "notion that the 

 only way to respond to the wants of the individual is to associate 

 him with the process of authority. It accepts therefore the old 

 claim that exclusion from a share in power is also exclusion 

 from a share in benefit. It regards the rights of man to share 

 in the results of social life as broadly equal j and it regards differ- 

 ences of treatment as justifiable only in so far as they can be 

 shown to be directly relevant to the common good." This goal 

 has never yet been wholly achieved and stabilized anywhere. 

 But with many waverings and setbacks mankind has moved 

 forward toward it. And there are still those who like to think 

 that Nicholas Murray Butler was right when he said thirty 



