VIII
The administration of justice is necessarily a social function in a democratic society. All juridical functions should be socialized in the strict sense of being maintained at the social expense for the free service of its citizens. Court fees, advocates' charges, and other expenses incidental to the administration of justice in present society are all anti-democratic and subversive of justice.
Finally, education is likewise a social necessity which society itself must assume responsibility for. We have discovered that for self-protection society must insist upon a certain minimum of education for every child able to receive it; that it is too vital a matter to be left to the option of parents or the desires of the immature child. We have made a certain minimum of education compulsory and free; the Socialist state would make a minimum—probably much larger than our present minimum—compulsory, but it would also make all education free. From the first stages, in the kindergartens, to the last, in the universities, education must be wholly free or equality of opportunity cannot be realized. So long as a single barrier exists to prevent any child from receiving all the education it is capable of profiting by, democracy is unattained.
Whether the Socialist state could tolerate the existence of elementary schools other than its own, such as privately conducted kindergartens, religious schools, and so on, is by no means agreed upon by Socialists. It is like the question of marriage, a matter which is wholly beyond the scope of present knowledge. The future will decide for itself. There are those who believe that the state would not content itself with refusing to permit religious doctrines or ideas to be taught in the schools, but would go further, and, as the protector of the child, guard its independence of thought in later life as far as possible by forbidding religious teaching of any kind in schools for children below a certain age. It would not, of course, attempt to prevent parental instruction in religious beliefs in the home. Beyond the age prescribed, religious education, in all other than public institutions of learning, would be freely admitted. This restriction of religious education to the years of judgment and discretion implies no hostility to religion on the part of the state, but complete neutrality. Not the least important of the rights of the child is the right to be protected from influences which bias the mind and destroy the possibilities of independent thought in later life, or make it attainable only as a result of bitter, needless, tragic experience. This is one view. On the other hand, there are probably quite as many Socialists who believe that the state would not attempt to prevent the religious education of children of any age, in schools voluntarily maintained for that purpose, independent of the public schools. They believe that the state would content itself with insisting that these religious schools must be so built and equipped as not to imperil the lives or the health of the children attending them, and so conducted as not to interfere with the public schools,—all of which means simply that, like vaccination, and the form of marriage contract, the question will be settled by the future in its own way. There is nothing in the fundamental principles of Socialism, nor any body of facts in our present experience, from which we can judge the manner of that settlement.
In this brief outline of the Socialist state as the writer, in common with many of his associates, conceives it, there are many gaps. The temptation to fill in the outline somewhat more in detail is strong, but that is beyond the borderland which divides scientific and Utopian methods. The purpose of the outline is mainly to show that the ideal of the Socialism of to-day is something far removed from the network of laws and the oppressive bureaucracy commonly imagined; something wholly different in spirit and substance from the mechanical arrangement of human relations imagined by Utopian romancers. If the Socialist propaganda of to-day largely consists of the advocacy of laws for the protection of labor and dealing with all kinds of evils, it must be remembered that these are to ameliorate conditions in the existing social order. Many of the laws for which Socialists have most strenuously fought have their raison d'être in the conditions of capitalist society, and would be quite unnecessary under Socialism. If a reference to one's personal work may be pardoned, I will cite the matter of the feeding of school children, in the public schools, at the public expense. I have, for many years, advocated this measure, which is to be found in most Socialist programmes, and which the Socialists of other countries have to a considerable extent carried into practical effect. Yet, I am free to say that the plan is not my ideal of the manner in which children should be fed. It is, at best, a palliative, a necessary evil, rendered necessary by the conditions of capitalist society. One hopes that in the Socialist régime, home life would be so far developed as to make possible the proper feeding and care of all children in their homes. This is but an illustration. The Socialist ideal of the state of the future, when private property is no longer an instrument of oppression used by the few against the many, is not a life completely enmeshed in a network of government, but a life controlled by government as little as possible; not a life ruled and driven by a powerful engine of laws, but a life as spontaneous and free as possible—a maximum of personal freedom with a minimum of restraint.
"These things shall be! A loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known shall rise
With flower of freedom in their souls