“THE BASIC TROUBLE WITH THE MODERN WORLD,” SAID ELLSWORTH Toohey, ”is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.

“That’s right!” shrieked Mitchell Layton.

It was an actual shriek, thin and high. It had come with the startling suddenness of a fire siren. His guests looked at Mitchell Layton.

He sat in a tapestry armchair of his drawing room, half lying, legs and stomach forward, like an obnoxious child flaunting his bad posture. Everything about the person of Mitchell Layton was almost and not quite, just short of succeeding: his body had started out to be tall, but changed its mind, leaving him with a long torso above short, stocky legs; his face had delicate bones, but the flesh had played a joke on them, puffing out, not enough to achieve obesity, just enough to suggest permanent mumps. Mitchell Layton pouted. It was not a temporary expression nor a matter of facial arrangement. It was a chronic attribute, pervading his entire person. He pouted with his whole body.

Mitchell Layton had inherited a quarter of a billion dollars and had spent the thirty-three years of his life trying to make amends for it.

Ellsworth Toohey, in dinner clothes, stood lounging against a cabinet. His nonchalance had an air of gracious informality and a touch of impertinence, as if the people around him did not deserve the preservation of rigid good manners.

His eyes moved about the room. The room was not exactly modern, not quite Colonial and just a little short of French Empire; the furnishings presented straight planes and swan-neck supports, black mirrors and electric hurricane lamps, chromium and tapestry; there was unity in a single attribute: in the expensiveness of everything.

“That’s right,” said Mitchell Layton belligerently, as if he expected everyone to disagree and was insulting them in advance. “People make too damn much fuss about freedom. What I mean is it’s a vague, over-abused word. I’m not even sure it’s such a God-damn blessing. I think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form—like a folk dance. You know how beautiful a folk dance is. And rhythmic too. That’s because it took generations to work it out and they don’t let just any chance fool