Men and women have for ages maintained the vision of a social order which embodied the highest good while eschewing all of the corrosive and degrading influences of force. The Christian "City of God," the anarchist "stateless society," the Marxist "withering away of the State," the transcendentalist "Brook Farm," and, in our own day, the young people's "communes"-each of these social models relies, in one way or another, on the assumption of the natural goodness and rationality of the human spirit. But there is a romantic and unreal quality to each of them. Each of them flounders on the fact that ignorance, ego, avarice, cruelty, and aggression are as natural to the human estate as morality and truth. Impelled by this circumstance of nature, force is not only a necessity of social order, it is a primary condition of achieving a just society. Discipline and punishment, whether in the education of a child or in life of a society, are tools of moral education. They act to repress those human impulses and instincts which thwart ethical development. They tend, rightly exercised, to educate men and women to life in a more perfect society. When exercised in conjunction with love, reason, and moral suasion, power is a tool or resource of morality. Seen in this light, the state's monopoly of coercive force can, under certain circumstances, constitute a condition of a just society and become the handmaiden of morality and the agent of civilization. In the words of the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, "law . . . is . . . the institutionalized medium of reason . . . (It is) all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling." But just as law and power serve the ends of morality, so too a sense of justice motivates men to social order. Force and threats of force are potent they may even be sufficient--causes of conformity to law. Equally potent, however, as a condition of lawful behavior, is the impress of morality. Lord Moulton, an English jurist, is quoted as having said that "obedience to the unenforceable" is the cement by which society is held together. If the majority of men and women were not capable of freely meeting countless and untold obligations of ordinary life in respect of one another, no state, however strong and however repressive, could maintain order. Moral sensibility works to avoid conflict and reconcile differences in the nooks and crannies of our social system in a way and to an extent no system of law enforcement could possibly accomplish. Moreover, we must note that laws are often obeyed because they are just and not necessarily because behind them lurks a mailed fist. A just state, one which rests its claim to its citizens' allegiance on conformity to their moral aspirations, achieves obedience to law as surely from its ethical responsiveness as from its monopoly of force. Some states can and do substantially eschew claims to the moral allegiance of their people. But the price they pay for this neglect is a heavy one, By failing to use or by lessening their use of the lever of moral suasion and sensibility, they are impelled by the mechanics of statescraft to lean more heavily on the lever of naked compulsion.