tury: the second to the
Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the
state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily
grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid
sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument
of civilization. The two theories need to be held together, yet clearly
distinguished.

Government has been an exalted policeman: it was there to guard property
and to prevent us from quarreling too violently. That was about all it
was good for. Yet society found problems on its hands--problems which
Woodrow Wilson calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and crime,
disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves on the attention of the
community. A typical example is the way the social evil compelled the
city of Chicago to begin an investigation. Yet when government was asked
to handle the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception of itself
as a policeman. Its only method was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in
short, to use the taboo. But experience has shown that the taboo will not
solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it
aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean
little intrusion when its only method is prosecution.

No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social
questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin
to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as
the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it
interferes with our lives, the better. Much of the horror of socialism
comes from a belief that by increasing the functions of government its
regulating power over our daily lives will grow into a tyranny. I share
this horror when certain socialists begin to propound their schemes.
There is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and arranging and
pocketing implied in some socialisms. There is a wish to have the state
use its position as general employer to become a censor of morals and
arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an
impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any
doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic
tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State.

So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous of the policeman's power.
Far better we may