Law, by regulating behaviour, constrains freedom. Liberty has rarely meant licence: not only are actions that harm others – such as assaults and thefts – prohibited, but also, at varying times in English and British history, behaviour that, if it harms at all, harms only the individual. For instance, suicide until 1961 was a criminal offence in England, and homo sexual acts were punishable until 1967. Conversely, drug-taking, which once was legal, is now an offence. In contrast, the consumption of alcohol, the intoxicant directly related to much violent crime, has never been prohibited by law in the western world, other than in a disastrous experiment in the United States.

Such activities as the physical expression of homosexual love, or the taking of drugs, are made into crimes, not because they are intrinsically evil, but because the mores of a particular society at a particular time deem them to be so. Such criminalisation is an expression of the coercive morality – or tyranny – of the majority. Victorian moralists, in particular Evangelicals who were ‘at the core of God's self-appointed law enforcement agency’, were ardent in their campaigns to protect women and children from sexual predation, and chimney sweeps from suffocation, but they were also anxious, through resort to legal proceedings, to restrict gin-drinking and gambling, and to extirpate pornography or anything which they considered to be indecent. Morality should be enforced.