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.