Middle-land

If anything, I keep this post to remember interesting quotes that crop up from time to time, this is an important one:

John Moulton was a distinguished judge, a man of science, and a chap who held the splendid title during the Great War of Britain's "director-general of explosive supplies," a job he did brilliantly. Lord Moulton divided society into three sectors, of which he considered the most important to be the "middle land" between law and absolute freedom — the domain of manners, in which the individual has to be "trusted to obey self-imposed law." "To my mind," wrote Moulton, "the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land." By that measure, our greatness is shriveling fast: The land of self-regulation has been encroached on remorselessly, to the point where we increasingly accept that everything is either legal or illegal, and therefore to render any judgment of our own upon the merits of this or that would be presumptuous.