Text 1 (В) Order

Order is rich with meaning. Let's start with "law and order". Maintain­ing order in this sense means establishing the rule of law to preserve life and to protect property. To the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679), preserving life was the most important function of law. He described life without law as life in a 'state of nature'. Without rules, people would live like predators, stealing and killing for personal benefit.

Members of every community have made laws for themselves in self-pro­tection. If it were not for the law, you could not go out in daylight without the fear of being kidnapped, robbed or murdered. There are far more good people in the world than bad, but there are enough of the bad to make law necessary in the interests of everyone. Even if we were all as good as we ought to be, laws would still be necessary. How is one good man in a mo­torcar to pass another good man also in a motorcar coming in an opposite direction, unless there is some rule of the road?

Suppose you went to a greengrocery — and bought some potatoes and found on your return home that they were mouldy or even that some of them were stones, what could you do if there were no laws on the subject? In the absence of law you could only rely upon the law of the jungle.

Every country tries, therefore, to provide laws, which will help its peo­ple to live safely and comfortably. This is not at all an easy thing to do. No country has been successful in producing laws, which are entirely satisfac­tory. But the imperfect laws are better than none.