ard 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