The horrendous lawless mess in Haiti has become a warning to the whole world of what happens when authority collapses and anarchy takes over. It is a “sign of the times” that must be heeded, an example of the “war of all against all” prophesied by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century as he examined the lessons of the English Civil War. Without a sovereign authority to administer a social contract, life proceeds with “no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.