say that moral and social problems be left to private
solution than that they be subjected to the clumsy method of the taboo.
When Woodrow Wilson argues that social problems are not susceptible to
treatment in a party program, he must mean only one thing: that they
cannot be handled by the state as he conceives it. He is right. His
attitude is far better than that of the Vice Commission: it too had only
a policeman's view of government, but it proceeded to apply it to
problems that are not susceptible to such treatment. Wilson, at least,
knows the limitations of his philosophy.

But once you see the state as a provider of civilizing opportunities, his
whole objection collapses. As soon as government begins to supply
services, it is turning away from the sterile tyranny of the taboo. The
provision of schools, streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks,
universities, medical attention, post-offices, a Panama Canal,
agricultural information, fire protection--is a use of government totally
different from the ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities is
to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire adherence to a
misunderstood ideal will raise any objection to them.

When an anarchist says that the state must be abolished he does not mean
what he says. What he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the
productive state. He cannot possibly object to being furnished with the
opportunity of writing to his comrade three thousand miles away, of
drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park. Of course when he
finds the post-office opening his mail, or a law saying that he must
drink nothing but water, he begins to object even to the services of the
government. But that is a confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are
merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon the twentieth. The
postmaster is still something of a policeman.

Once you realize that moral and social problems must be treated to fine
opportunities, that the method of the future is to compete with the devil
rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of civilized environments
is the goal of statecraft, then there is no longer any reason for keeping
social and moral questions out of politics. They are what politics must
deal with essentially, now that it has found a way. The policeman with
his taboo did make moral and social questions insusceptible to treatment
in party platforms. He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant,