Chapter VII (1)

THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.

I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism
between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers
for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity
of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior
races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to
the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction
of the number of births physiological, moral, or
economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.

II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious
powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The
influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of
small families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the
law in regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform
of the law of inheritance—Reform of the military law for
the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting
emigration to the French colonies.

III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a
substitute for religious sentiment.

One of the most important of the problems to which the gradual enfeeblement of the religious sentiment has given rise is that of race fertility and the question of population. Almost all religions have attached a considerable importance to the rapid increase of population. With the diminution of the influence of religions among the superior races of mankind, shall we not lose an important aid in their maintenance and multiplication?

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[Sidenote: Antagonism between wealth and population.]

I. In the beginning, for the earliest aggregations of mankind, number was a condition of power and consequently of security. The power of wealth, which can be concentrated in the possession of a single man, did not, so to speak, exist. In our days wealth has become a power which is sufficient unto itself, and which division and distribution often inevitably dissipate. Therein lies the source of the reasoning which appeals nowadays to the heads of families: “To render a family powerful one must transmit one’s capital in as undivided a state as possible; that is to say, one must restrict the numbers of one’s descendants to the utmost feasible limits.” Capital and capitalistic egoism is therefore the enemy of population, because multiplication of men always implies a more or less minute subdivision of wealth.

[Sidenote: Importance of rapid increase of population.]

Religion has always held the power of capital, in this respect, in check. The Christian, the Hindu, the Mohammedan religion all correspond to a state of things very different from that of the modern world; to a state of society in which number constitutes a great power, in which large families possess an immediate and visible utility. The greater number of the great religions are at one in the precept: “Increase and multiply.” According to the laws of Manou, one of the conditions of salvation is the large number of male descendants. The religious and national tradition of the Jews on the point is well known. Every religion of Jewish origin being thus favourable to increase in the size of the family, and expressly prohibiting means of prevention, it follows that, other things equal, a sincerely Christian or Jewish people will multiply more rapidly than a free-thinking people. The infertility of the higher races, over and above the influence of the opposition between religion and the modern spirit, is induced also by a sort of antinomy between civilization and race propagation: rapid civilization is always accompanied by a certain race corruption. This antinomy must be remedied under penalty of extinction. Life is intense in proportion to the number of young, ambitious people who engage in it; the struggle for existence is fertile just so far as it is carried on by young men rather than by men who are fatigued and who no longer possess an enthusiasm for work; a young and rapidly increasing nation constitutes a richer and more powerful organism, a steam-engine working at a high pressure. One-half, perhaps three-fourths of the distinguished men have come of numerous families; some have been the tenth, some the twelfth child; to restrict the number of children is to restrict the production of talent and genius, and that, too, out of all proportion to the restriction of the family. An only son, far from having, on the average, a greater number of chances of being a remarkable man, really possesses fewer; in especial if he belongs to the upper classes. “Both the mother and father, it has been said, watch over this first child and enfeeble it by superfluous care, and spare it, by yielding to its wishes, all moral gymnastic.” Every child who expects to be the sole inheritor of a small fortune will put forth less energy, in the struggle for existence, than he otherwise would. And finally, it is a physiological fact that the first children are often less vigorous and less intelligent; maternity is a function which becomes perfect, as other functions do, by repetition; a mother’s first effort is as rarely a masterpiece as a poet’s. To limit the number of children is, therefore, in a certain measure to dwarf their physical and intellectual powers.

[Sidenote: Fallacy of Malthusianism.]

As an increase of population heightens the intensity of the physical and mental life of a nation, so also it heightens the intensity of the economic life of a nation, stimulates the circulation of wealth, and ultimately increases the public treasure instead of diminishing it. It is happening under our very eyes in Germany and England, where public wealth has increased side by side with the population. In Germany, in a period of nine years (1872-1881), the average annual revenue of each individual increased six per cent., while the population rolled up by millions. The economical doctrine which regards overpopulation as the principal cause of poverty is a very superficial one. As long as there is an available plot of ground unoccupied, and perhaps even after the entire earth shall be cultivated (for science may be able to create new sources of wealth and even of food) a man will always constitute a bit of living capital, of a higher value than a horse or a cow, and to increase the numbers of citizens of a nation will be to increase the sum of its wealth.[96]

[96] What economists have really established, and what MM.
Maurice Block, Courcelles-Seneuil, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Othenin
d’Haussonville are right in maintaining, is that it is harmful
to society to add to the non-working classes, to the number
of feeble beings who are incapable of labour, to the number
of beggars, and of non-combatants generally, whoever they may
be. Well, poverty favours the birth of those who are dependent
upon society, and the birth of those who are dependent upon
society tends still further to increase poverty; that is the
circle from which so many economists have believed that the
precepts of Malthus offered them an issue. Unhappily, if there
is one universal attribute of poverty, it is its fertility;
for in all nations the poorest classes are those that have the
greatest number of children. Malthus has never been listened to
by the poorer classes, but precisely by those only who, from
the point of view of a sagacious political economy, ought to be
encouraged to leave as many children behind them as possible,
because they alone would educate them well: that is to say, the
economical peasantry and the prosperous middle class. Insomuch
that a fertility of the poor is absolutely without remedy
(except by way of charity or emigration); but it constitutes in
the end a much less considerable evil than the infertility of a
nation as a whole, and is an ultimate evil only because, in the
last analysis, it results in a genuine unproductivity. Poverty,
especially in the cities, rapidly kills out the most prolific
races.

[Sidenote: Menace to modern civilization.]

Formerly the struggle for existence between two races or nations ended in a single violent crisis: the vanquished were massacred or reduced to slavery, and slavery usually resulted in the gradual extinction of the inferior race; it was a slow massacre. Famine, produced by methodical devastation, achieved what war had begun—whole races disappeared abruptly from the face of the globe and left not a trace behind: the most recent and most striking example is that of the great American empires of Mexico and Peru. Thus the strongest and most intelligent races alone survived, and had only to confirm their victory with all its consequences by clearing the earth before them. Existence was a monopoly in the hands of the strong. It is no longer so. To-day the vanquished are no longer massacred; on the contrary, when an uncivilized country is conquered, it is supplied with good laws, with police and hygiene. Inferior races increase and multiply under the rule of superior races. The Cape negroes, the Chinese, the negroes in the United States, and even the last surviving red-skins, who seem disposed to-day to take heart, are examples of what I mean. Well, the Orient contains, in the Chinese Empire, a veritable reservoir of men, which some day or other will overflow the entire earth. In the face of this compact multitude, which is increasing rapidly, and with advancing civilization will increase more rapidly, the four or five great nations of Europe, and the United States and Australia, seem a small matter. The future of humanity depends mathematically upon the proportions in which the more intelligent races are represented in the complex composition of the man of the future. And every son of one of the more highly endowed races of the globe, such as the French, German, or English, commits a positive fault in not labouring for the multiplication of his race; he contributes to lower the future level of human intelligence. Men of science have already established it as a law that the power of reproduction decreases with the increase of cerebral activity, and that intelligent races reproduce themselves with increasing difficulty; to augment this natural difficulty by a voluntary restriction is daily to labour for the brutalization of the human race.

[Sidenote: Duty of civilized races to multiply.]

The followers of Malthus, supposing that there at present exists an equilibrium between population and the means of subsistence, look with anxiety upon every new arrival in the world; but even admitting that the struggle for existence has already reached that acute stage, it might still be hoped that only the more intelligent would leave children behind them. Malthus’ law should possess no force for the educated men of Europe, who alone are acquainted with it, but only for the negroes or the Chinese, who are absolutely ignorant of it. Malthus’ law is not meant for us; in reality it is not meant for anyone. By the very fact that one is acquainted with it, and possesses foresight and self-control enough to put it into practice, one proves that one stands beyond the circle of its applicability. Malthusians, who endeavour to apply to the reproduction of mankind the principles of animal-breeders, forget that the dominant principle in all breeding is to favour the multiplication of the superior species. One Durham bull is worth ten common bulls. What is true of bulls and sheep is true of men: a Frenchman, with the scientific and æsthetic aptitude of his race, represents on the average a social capital a hundred times greater than that represented by a negro, an Arab, a Turk, a Cossack, or a Chinaman. To leave few French descendants, in order that Cossacks and Turks may increase and multiply, is to commit an absurdity, even on the principles of a Malthusian. Be it remembered that it was among the Aryans, and in especial among the Greeks, that science and art worthy of the name took their rise; from them they passed to the other Aryans, and then to the other human races.

[Sidenote: Bad outlook for the future.]

Michelet compares the treasure of science and truth, amassed by the human mind, to the egg that a slave carried into the Roman circus, at the end of the entertainment, into the midst of the great lions, who were gorged and asleep. If one of the wild beasts opened his eyes and was seized once more by desire at sight of the man with the egg, which is the symbol of human genius, the slave was lost. In our times genius is infinitely less persecuted than heretofore, and is no longer in danger of the arena or of the headsman, and it seems as if the sacred egg out of which the future is to arise has nothing further to fear; but this is a mistake. Precisely because the human mind is year by year growing richer, its treasure is becoming so considerable, so delicate, and difficult to preserve in its entirety, that it may well be asked whether a succession of people sufficiently well endowed will arise to retain and to augment the acquisitions of science. Up to the present day those truths alone have survived the wear and tear of time which were simple; at the present epoch the rapidity of the progress of science may well make us anxious as to its permanence. The extreme complexity of science may well make us fear that the peoples of the future may not possess mental elevation enough to embrace it in its entirety, and to add to it by a constant increase. Suppose, for example, that the world should be reduced abruptly to Africa, Asia, and South America, where the Spanish race has not yet produced a single scientific genius; must not the scientific labours of our century inevitably miscarry? Happily their safety is bound up with that of certain great nations. The Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples to-day cover the earth with their children and their colonies. But it is sad to think that one of the three or four great European peoples, which alone count for much in the progress of humanity, should be dancing gaily toward annihilation.

[Sidenote: Danger from Asia.]

A fusion of races will sooner or later take place in humanity; it is already taking place in the United States, and the perfection of means of communication is hastening its consummation throughout the entire world. Europe is pouring out its surplus upon America, Africa, and Australia; Asia will some day overflow Europe and America; what is taking place to-day, fifty years after the invention of railways, can scarcely give us an idea of the mixture and amalgamation of races which will some day be realized on the earth. Such a mixture, even though it raise the level, in some small degree, of races intellectually ill-endowed, may well abase the level of races intellectually well-endowed, if the latter are greatly outnumbered by the former.

[Sidenote: Money the modern patent of nobility.]

It may be objected, it is true, that the superior races of mankind may remain isolated in the midst of the multiplication of the other branches of humanity in a sort of jealous aristocracy, served and respected by those whom they dominate by their intelligence. This is one of the dreams of M. Renan, who sees in the Chinese the future slave of the Europeans—gentle, docile slaves, with just enough intelligence to be marvellous industrial machines. Unhappily we have learned, to our expense, that the Chinese are also excellent instruments of war. In the industrial society in which we live, money constitutes, in the long run, the basis of aristocracy. To-day money is the true force and title of nobility. To lay up treasures demands a very average intelligence, of which a great number of inferior people are no doubt capable: once rich and they will be our equals; richer, they will be our superiors and our masters. If they have money enough they can purchase every privilege, even that of mixing their blood with ours, even that of marrying our daughters and of confounding our race and theirs. The only means by which intelligence can preserve its power is by means of numbers. Genius itself must leave a posterity behind it, and in spite of prejudice to the contrary, if we are to be eternal it must be by means of our children rather than by our works.

[Sidenote: Religion of the family.]

Positivists propose to substitute a religion of humanity for existing and rapidly disappearing religions; there is a still more accessible religion, and more practical, and more useful, which was one of the first religions of humanity: the religion of the family, the worship of the little group of beings bound together by ties of blood and memory and name and honour, which form an epitome of a nation; to permit one’s family to die out or to diminish in number is to labour, to the extent that in one lies, to diminish the power of one’s native country and of humanity itself. Patriotism has been made a subject of ridicule, but patriotism is a beautiful thing, and befitting in the head of a household. Paternity in its completest sense, that is to say, the responsibility for the education of a new generation from birth to the age of manhood, is, after all, the surest element of patriotism, and is within the reach of everyone.

[Sidenote: Gradual impoverishment of France.]

In France especially, as we have seen, the population question is an important one, and should be insisted on. It has been said with reason that France to-day is not threatened by a multitude of dangers, but by one only, which actually constitutes a national peril: that of extinction from lack of children.[97] A nation may increase its capital in two ways; 1. By productive expenditure and productive labour; 2. By the utmost possible diminution of both, of labour and of expenditure. France has been employing the second means since the beginning of the present century; she has been economizing in children and diminishing the rapidity of the circulation of national life. She has, by this process, amassed a great treasure, but the results of her economy have been in part consecrated to the payment of an indemnity of five billions, and in part to loans, as in Mexico, Turkey, and Egypt, and to speculation of every kind, and the result of these blind economies has been a gradual impoverishment.

[97] M. Richet.

[Sidenote: Classes in France that maintain the population.]

Over and above those who are unreflective, or who simply trust to luck, there exists no considerable class of people in France, except Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, who can be counted on to maintain the race. There exists no doubt a certain number of _bons vivants_ who are determined to take their pleasure at all hazards, and who find in the restriction of the family a limitation of their pleasure; but they are rare. The disciples of Malthus are nowadays much more numerous than those of Rabelais. People who have children, not out of pleasure nor by chance, but out of patriotism and philosophy, are so rare that they need not at present be taken into account. The more the property in France is subdivided, the greater the number of small proprietors, the fewer children there are. Since 1866 the agricultural inquiry has demonstrated the invasion of Malthusianism and the progress of voluntary infertility in almost every department _side by side with the subdivision of the soil_. From that time on the movement has gone forward unchecked. “In certain communes the words brother and sister have almost fallen out of use. Primogeniture, which was abolished in 1789, has been replaced by unigeniture.”[98] Labourers only are anti-malthusians, and that out of carelessness for the future. A Malthusian was one day remonstrating with a poor labourer, who was the father of twelve children and ambitious to become the father of a thirteenth. “What will you have?” said the latter, “it is the only pleasure in the world that I get for nothing; I would not diminish it on any account.”

[98] Toubeau, _La Répartition des impôts_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Power of religion to stimulate population.]

It has been maintained that a greater or less restriction of the number of births is essentially due, not to a diminution in the religious devotion of the people, but simply to an increase of prudence. Whoever does not live simply in the present moment, but takes account of the future, will restrict the number of his children according to the figure of his income. And yet where faith is sincere and rigid, it does not permit one to hesitate on mere grounds of economics. In Brittany prudence neither checks religion nor fertility. Engaged couples, knowing that they will have children after marriage, postpone their union till they shall have laid by a certain amount of money, purchased a house and a plot of ground. In the department of Ille-et-Vilaine, men do not generally become engaged before their twenty-fourth year, nor women before their nineteenth year. Marriage does not last as long therefore in Brittany as in Normandy; it lasts on the average twenty-seven years and a half in Normandy and twenty-one in Brittany, and yet the fertility of the women of Brittany, as compared with that of the women of Normandy, is almost as that of a hundred to sixty. In Brittany the result of religion and prudence, before marriage, combined, is a constant increase of population; in Normandy the effect of incredulity and prudence, after marriage, combined, is a constant diminution of the population; although, of the two peoples, the Normans are more vigorous, and owing to the greater frequency of twins, naturally more fertile.[99]

[99] See M. Baudrillart, _Les Populations rurales de la
Bretagne_.

[Sidenote: Condition of population in France not due to aversion to marriage.]

The weakness of the French as a nation does not lie in the smallness of the number of marriages. Practically the average number of marriages in France is the same as in Germany, something like eight a year for every thousand inhabitants, so that marriages are about as frequent in France as elsewhere. There is no question of immorality involved, but simply one of the prudence of married people. Illegitimate births are less numerous in France than in Italy or in Germany and in especial in Catholic Germany. In Paris scarcely more than twenty-five per cent. of the children are illegitimate, at Osmultz in Moravia fully seventy per cent. are illegitimate. M. Bertillon has established the fact that, since the beginning of the century, the percentage of marriage has been maintained, and even has increased rather than diminished up to 1865; but that the percentage of births has diminished continuously, and regularly. According to statistics every marriage averages five children in Germany, five in England, or almost five, and three only in France.

[Sidenote: Nor to degree of civilization in France.]

Certain thinkers have been inclined to believe that the comparative slowness in the increase of the French people was due to a relatively high development of the brain. We have already remarked the antagonism which exists between reproduction and the development of the nervous or cerebral system, but it is somewhat precipitate to apply to a special group of men what is true of the species as a whole; and there is a touch of fatuity in the notion that the French people have achieved so high a point of development that there exists in certain provinces not only a decrease in the rate of reproduction, but an absolute decrease of population. A statistical investigation has shown, it is true, that members of the Institute do not average more than one or two children apiece, but this statistical inquiry proves simply that members of the Institute have not desired to have large families, and that their conduct, which is generally not influenced by religion, has been comformable to their desire. An ordinarily healthy man could become the father of a hundred children every year; and to imagine that his sexual needs diminish under the influence of intellectual labour to the extent of his having but one child in forty years would be more apropos in a comic opera than in a serious book. Remark, however, that the fertility is less great among peasants, whose cerebral activity is at a minimum, than in our cities, in which it is relatively great; but in cities fertility is balanced unhappily by mortality. The antagonism between fertility and development of the brain should be at its greatest in women; but Frenchwomen, whose education has long been neglected, do not appear to possess on the average any intellectual superiority over the women of other countries. And in our provinces population advances most slowly in Normandy, where the women are so vigorous that the percentage of twins is higher than elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Malthusianism the cause.]

Malthusianism therefore is the cause of the evil, and malthusianism is a worse scourge than pauperism; it is in a sense the pauperism of the middle classes. Just as an excessive impoverishment may kill out a whole social class, malthusianism is the death of the middle classes. It is rare to find a middle-class family with more than two or three children; two children, at least, are necessary to replace the father and the mother, and to maintain the population; a certain number of celibates and of married people who are sterile must be allowed for. The middle classes therefore are approaching extinction: the result of restricting their number is suicide.

To sum up, the population question in France is purely and simply a moral question; but more than any other question of the like nature it is closely bound up with religion because, up to the present time, religion has been the sole power which has dared to check popular inclination in this regard. It is in respect to population that lay morality has been most negligent.

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[Sidenote: Futility of effort to bring about a return of religion.]

II. If the question is really one of a return to some traditional religion or a gradual extinction of the race, free-thinkers may well hesitate between a number of lines of conduct. They may, in the first place, take refuge in resignation: “After me the Deluge.” Many of the middle classes and a great number even of economists, who regard the future of their race and of their country as much too distant to be taken into account and consider present comfort as the sole rational aim of man, accept this position. A more radical alternative is to join the Church: both the Catholic and the Protestant churches, in spite of the eccentricity of their legends, are useful as an aid in making a nation numerous and strong and prolific; and the French of all nations needs religion, so that, instead of endeavouring to destroy the Christian faith, it is our duty to endeavour to propagate it. There is an element of hypocrisy and even of cowardice in this effort to revive a bygone error in the name of present utility. And it involves the affirmation that error is at the bottom more useful than truth, and that truth is fundamentally irreconcilable with the continued existence of the human race—an affirmation which is somewhat precipitate. Above all, the effort to arrest scepticism is simply futile—futile for humanity, for a people, for a family. When it is time to regret that certain things have been learned it is too late to set about ignoring them. The French people, in especial, possess a fund of incredulity which is based upon the practical and logical character of their temperament: they rose in 1789 against the clergy, in the name of liberty; nowadays they will struggle with the same stubbornness in the name of comfort against the prescriptions of religion, against the very instincts of human nature, and will make themselves sterile in order to become rich without immoderate labour. The re-establishment of religion is simply out of the question; sincerely religious men themselves, if they happen also to be intelligent, recognize it. This rational sterility, produced by a triumph of the intellect over natural instinct and religious dogma, is a charming theme for declamation; but declamation is also sterile, and does not date from yesterday; it was tried before the Revolution and succeeded neither in augmenting religious sensibility nor in diminishing French infertility. In a pamphlet on the Erreurs de Voltaire, the Abbé Nonotte wrote in 1766: “Present notions and practices on the subject of population are as melancholy for morality as for statesmanship. People are content nowadays with a single heir. Pleasure and libertinism carry the day. The fortunes of a great number of the first families in Paris rest on the shoulders of a single child. It was better in former times; for families were not afraid of a number of children, and were not so extravagant but that they could provide them with a means of subsistence.”

[Sidenote: Inability of priest to cope with question of population.]

Neither the priest nor the confessor can be counted on. Has the priest ever power enough, even in countries like Brittany where devotion is at its height, to suppress the grossest vice; drunkenness, for example, and that, too, among women? How can a priest be expected to maintain an influence over men who confess hardly more than once a year—at Easter? How can the priest, under such circumstances, be expected to be really a governor of the conscience, and in especial a physician of the soul? He receives a general confession from each of his parishioners, he is in a hurry, he is obliged to restrict his attention to the most enormous of the sins confessed to him, and the whole ends in absolution, followed by communion. Some days afterward the men get drunk again, and do just as they did before, till the year comes round. Prejudices and habits are stronger than anything else.

[Sidenote: Pliancy of religion.]

They who, with the Abbé Nonotte, regard religion as the cure of all evils, forget that religion itself is very compliant, that it can be made to stand for a multitude of things. If the mass of the French people should allow themselves to be persuaded by the Abbé Nonotte and his disciples to return to the traditional faith, the traditional faith itself would soon cease to be so austere. Confessors would become more discreet. Are they not to-day obliged to tolerate polkas and waltzes, and young people whirling about the room in each other’s arms, which was formerly so severely prohibited? The letter of religion remains in vain the same, the spirit of the worshippers changes. At the present day Jesuits willingly close their eyes to the sterility of the family; they have even been accused of whispering to advice for the preservation of certain inheritances. Do you imagine that confessors in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ask especially embarrassing questions? Heaven can be compromised with.

[Sidenote: Even of Protestantism.]

This sort of tolerance, like all tolerance, will grow with time. Even in Protestant families in which a more extreme rigidity reigns, the spirit of the times is dominant. Orthodoxy is everywhere becoming less ferocious, sterility is everywhere on the increase. Even clergymen do not have as large families as formerly. Statistics on this head would be very instructive; one might find in the very bosom of Protestantism sterility increasing directly with liberalism of belief. If Darwin and Spencer have partisans in the English clergy, and among the American Protestants, why should not Malthus also? In especial, since Malthus was a grave and religious man.

[Sidenote: Decrease of population encouraged by the Catholic Church.]

The Catholic religion has itself been guilty by its advocacy of religious celibacy. In France one hundred and thirty thousand persons of both sexes are devoted to celibacy.[100] It is to be regretted that Catholicism, which during a number of centuries (in the time when St. Sidonius Apollinaris, the son-in-law of the Emperor Avitus, was Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand) did not impose celibacy upon ecclesiastics, should have felt obliged later to exact it, and should have come to consider absolute continence superior to marriage, contrary to all physiological and psychological laws. “Continence as a profession,” says M. Montesquieu, “has destroyed more men than pestilence and war together. Every religious house constitutes a family which never gives birth to a child, and which continues in existence only by adopting children from without. Such houses are open like so many abysses, to swallow up the future of the race.” Religious celibacy results in another evil consequence: although priests do not to-day constitute the élite of society, they are still among the most intelligent, the best educated, the least ill-disposed members of society. And they gaily consent to be annihilated, to disappear, and to leave, like the heretics they used to burn, no trace behind. They form as constant a drain on the body-politic as the victims of the Inquisition formed during so many years in Spain. If we should count the sons only of clergymen who have become distinguished or even great men, from Linnæus to Wurtz and Emerson, we might see how much we lose by the celibacy of our priesthood.

[100] Dr. Lagneau, _Remarques démographiques sur le célibat en
France_.

But religion apart, sterility may be combated by law, by morals, and by education.

[Sidenote: Legal remedy.]

Religion is the law of primitive peoples; when it becomes feeble, its precepts split into two parts: one of which, regarded as useless, is neglected and loses its entire value, while the other, which is regarded as the guarantee of social life, becomes formulated into moral or civilized laws obligatory in character. This is the history of a number of hygienic measures prescribed by Oriental religion which have become simple police regulations in the laws of modern Europe. In the present question it is evident that the law should take the place that religion once held; the legislator should assume the function of the priest. Such a substitution is not unexampled; it took place among the Greeks; the citizen was obliged, by law, to have children. Socrates in Athens was obliged by law to take a second wife. In Sparta the young husband lived at the public table until he had supplied the state with three sons. He was subject to military service until he had supplied the state with four.[101] Nowadays of course such radical laws are not to be thought of, and indeed no simple and direct law could reach the evil; an entire system of mutually completing laws is necessary. The whole series of reasons which prevent the head of a household from having a large family must first be known; then they must be met in detail by a series of laws devised to suppress them or counterbalance them; so that whenever one interest makes for sterility, another and equivalent interest shall make for fertility. It is accordingly in the very bosom of the family that the law, and that progressive reform of morals to which the law is so capable of contributing, must operate.

[101] Aristotle, _Politica_, ii. 6, 13.

[Sidenote: Worship of comfort a reason for small families.]

The head of a family to-day abandons the notion of having many children for a number of reasons, sometimes mutually contradictory, which it is necessary we should make ourselves fully acquainted with before endeavouring to devise means of counteracting them. There exist in the first place, though not very frequently, physical reasons: the ill-health of the mother, the fear of her dying through frequent pregnancies. When this fear is justified in the judgment of a physician it is respectable; it is defensible even from the point of view of society, for children born under such conditions would be delicate and useless as members of society. But in almost the whole number of cases, the grounds of sterility are economical and egoistic. French sterility is an economical, much more than a physiological phenomenon. The head of a family calculates the cost of rearing a numerous family, calculates that instead of being able to lay by money while he is in the vigour of his life, he will have to spend it on his children, and to pass his old age in poverty; having a large family he regards simply as a bit of prodigality. Our budget of 4,200,000,000 represents an average of 113 francs a head; with such taxes, decidedly, if one is to bring up a numerous family, one must have a considerable fortune or must deftly manipulate one’s poverty.

[Sidenote: Worship of land another.]

Also the small proprietor regards the earth somewhat as a savage does his fetich: his field, his house, are sacred entities which he wishes to confide to sure hands. If he has a number of children, it will be necessary to share these treasures and perhaps to sell them in case they cannot otherwise be divided equally. The peasant no more regards such a division of property as possible than a gentleman under the old régime would have admitted the possibility of selling his ancestral chateau. Both of them would regard a mutilation of their family as a less evil than the mutilation of their domain. But to rear a child is to create a bit of capital, and fertility is a form of social economy. Both economists and French peasants admit willingly that to rear a calf or a sheep is to add to one’s wealth, and _a fortiori_ they should admit that to rear a child is. But there is a difference: the calf, once reared, labours solely for the person who reared it, whereas the child ultimately comes to labour for itself. From the selfish point of view of the father, it is better to raise cattle and sheep. From the point of view of society, it is incontestably better to rear men. In all new countries the French race is prolific, because a large number of children under such circumstances is not a charge but a profitable investment. In Canada sixty thousand Frenchmen have grown into a people of two millions and a half. In Algeria the birth-rate is from 30 to 35 per 1000; in Normandy it is not 20 per thousand. Finally, a striking example of the influence of emigration has been discovered in France itself, in the Department of the Basses-Pyrénées, where the birth-rate varies with the rate of emigration, to fill the places of those who have gone to America.

[Sidenote: Women of fashion imitate the demi-monde.]

Let us consider, on the other hand, the causes which influence women. It is natural that, in a certain stage of society, women should be unwilling to be mothers. Motherhood represents the sole task which it is left to them to perform, and this task they find the harder because fortune has relieved them of every other. They are not even obliged to nourish their children: the maternal breast can find a substitute; they are not obliged either to rear their children or to teach them: governesses can be hired; but nobody can give birth to their children, and in their life of frivolity childbirth is the one serious function that remains. They protest against it and they are right. The ambition of women of the _grandmonde_ being too often, as has been said, to mimic women of the _demi-monde_, it is well that they should imitate them in this respect as in all others, and that they should endeavour to establish between marriage and prostitution this final bond of similarity—sterility.

[Sidenote: Women of the lower classes fear labour.]

Even among the women of the people gestation and childbirth, being, as they are, painful, are also objects of the liveliest repugnance and of protestations of every kind. I have never seen a woman of the people who did not complain at being pregnant and who would not have preferred any other malady. _Ah! Nous ne faisons pas, nous recevons_—“We women have no voice in the matter,” said one of them to me—“if but we had!” She epitomized in a word the physiological and psychological position of the poor woman. Those who have not had children, far from complaining of it, congratulate themselves, and in any event they rarely desire more than one.

[Sidenote: Large families among the poor traceable to ignorance.]

In Picardy and in Normandy, as M. Baudrillart remarks, a woman who has many children is made the butt of raillery. And if other provinces are less sterile, it is owing to religion or to ignorance. The women have not yet become acquainted with Malthus. They know of but one remedy against an evil that they fear—to keep out of the way of their husbands. The wife of such and such a labouring man prefers a beating to the risk of having another child: but as she is the weaker she often succeeds in bringing upon herself both the beating and the child. Fear of pregnancy is more often than is commonly believed the cause of dissension in poor households, and for that matter in rich households also. The instant a woman reasons, instead of submitting to the law, she inevitably feels the disproportion that exists, for her, between the pleasures of love and the pains of maternity. She must be supplied with a new conception of duty, and that not simply in the way of a religious obligation which the husband can ridicule but of a moral obligation.

[Sidenote: Girls should be educated for maternity.]

Catholic education, as we have already remarked, does great harm in rearing young girls in a false modesty, in never speaking to them of the duties of marriage for fear of awakening their imagination in the direction of their future husband. The actual result is precisely the opposite of the calculated result. Young girls see nothing in marriage but the future husband and unknown pleasures. They never think of any matter of painful duty which they must accept in advance; they do not consider children as a question of duty but of necessity simply, they are actuated by but one ambition, that of diverting themselves. Girls should be educated and prepared for motherhood; our present education is adapted to the formation of nuns or old maids, sometimes of courtesans, for we neglect early to inspire woman with a feeling of duty for her proper function, which constitutes also a large portion of all that is moral in her life—the duty of maternity. Happily, married women cannot remain sterile simply by wishing it, their husbands must become their accomplices; it is their husbands, who, in the last resort, are responsible. If the husband, out of complaisance to his wife or to his wife’s relatives, undertakes to be a Malthusian _malgré lui_, he plays almost as ridiculous a rôle as that of Georges Dandin: the man who permits himself to be dictated to in the matter of not having children is almost as complaisant as the man who acknowledges the children of other people.

[Sidenote: Paternal love tends to restrict the number of children.]

Another cause which explains the low birth-rate in France is that paternal and maternal love is more tender and more exclusive there than in other countries. The French family, whatever may be said to the contrary, is much more closely united than the English or German family: in it a sort of fraternity obtains between parents and children. Members of a family separate with regret, and the ideal of the father is to have so few children that he may always keep them by him. We are too refined, too far advanced from a state of nature, to submit without suffering to the rupture which puberty naturally brings about in the animal family, to the flight of the young bird whose wings are grown; we have not the courage to accept the dismemberment of the household, far less to wish it as a necessity and, on the whole, a good thing. This affection has of course its egoistic side, and it is on that side that it results in sterility. Parents rear children less for the children’s sake than for their own.

[Sidenote: Two legal remedies.]

Having thus passed in review the principal causes which restrict the number of children in French families let us consider what influence law and morals might exert in counteracting them. Legal reforms should be directed especially toward the two following points: 1. Reform of the law relating to filial duties (maintenance of parents); 2. Reform of the law of inheritance; 3. Reform of the military law, so as to favour numerous families and permit emigration to the French colonies.

[Sidenote: Present state of the law does not sufficiently protect parents against ingratitude.]

Rearing children being a considerable trouble and expense it is necessary that it should be made profitable, that it should be converted into a species of loan for a long term of years. The law can bring this about in various ways. French legislation has protected children by a provision that their fathers cannot completely disinherit them; it should also have protected fathers against children’s ingratitude. It often happens, in the country especially, that after an aged couple have reared a numerous generation they find themselves dependent upon their sons or upon their sons-in-law and are ill-fed and greeted with abuse. The law provides that children must maintain their parents, no doubt, but maintenance may be supplied in a manner which renders it little better than assassination. The law which has endeavoured to establish the moral independence of the son as against the father might well endeavour to establish on a firm basis the moral independence of the parents themselves. If a father to-day cannot disinherit his son, is it not shocking that a son should be able, in a sense, to disinherit his father—to accept life, nourishment, education from him and to give derision, abusive language, and sometimes blows in return? Observers who have lived among the people, in especial in country districts, uniformly bear witness to the deplorable situation of certain old men who are obliged to beg on the highroad, or of their neighbours, for means of support which are refused them in their own houses. The present French law is helpless in the presence of filial ingratitude which takes the form, not of overt act, but of abusive language and disrespectful conduct. It annuls a donation made to an ungrateful child, but it cannot annul the donation of life, and ungrateful children benefit by the inability. A father should be able to count at least on a certain minimum of revenue from his children, whoever they may be.[102]

[102] We are not obliged here to enter into details of
administration. Perhaps it would be no more than just to give
parents their choice between living with their children,
which is often so painful, and an annual sum, proportional
to the salary and resources of the children. This sum might
be taxed by the state or the commune, and paid by it to the
father. Every head of a family would at once reflect that if
he some day becomes poor and has but one child he will have
but one source of income, whereas, if he has ten children,
he will have ten sources of income, and ten chances that one
of them may be considerable; as it would be if any of one’s
children should have become wealthy. A numerous family would
thus constitute a guarantee of independence for the father; on
the other hand, the more he expended in educating them, the
greater chance he would have of later obtaining an equivalent
return for it. In labouring for the augmentation of the social
capital he would thus be securing an insurance for his old
age. Even supposing that the execution of a law of this kind
should be difficult, the right of parents to some really active
gratitude on the part of their children should be recognized
and consecrated formally by the letter of the law, which should
prescribe a line of conduct for children and even fix a certain
appropriate ratio between their income and the amount of their
remittances to their parents. The law should even do what in
it lies to efface from the language, in especial in their
applicability to those who have generously fulfilled their
duties of paternity, the shameful words: _être à la charge de
ses enfants_—dependent on his children for support; the public
should be made accustomed to consider this sort of dependence
not as an accident to the children, and as a misfortune, and
almost a disgrace, to the parents, but as a natural consequence
of the relation of parent and child.

[Sidenote: The state owes parents a debt.]

If, as is probable, the principle of social insurance is ultimately to prevail, and if a certain amount of the regular income of every labourer is to be retained and laid by to form a provision for his old age, which his employer or the state will increase in certain proportions, we believe that it would be equitable to increase the provision laid by for the father of a family in a larger ratio than the provision laid by for a celibate. The father of a family having done more for the state than the celibate—having contributed to the state his time and trouble and expense in rearing certain members of the new generation—it would be legitimate for the state to make a restitution to him of some small portion of the money he has laid out in a disinterested manner; in a manner which did not benefit him and has benefited the state.

[Sidenote: Tax on celibacy.]

Meanwhile this consummation is somewhat distant, and there is a reform immediately practicable: a tax on celibacy. Whenever this tax has been mentioned it has been made the subject of universal ridicule; it has been represented, as M. Ch. Richet remarked, as a sort of penalty, a fine for not being willing or not being able to marry. This is a very unfair statement of the case; the measure would be simply strict justice. With anything like an equality in the matter of fortune a celibate pays smaller taxes (indirect taxes, taxes on doors and windows, etc.); and the tax of rearing a family, by which the married man serves the state in a number of ways at once, the celibate avoids altogether. The celibate therefore is an altogether privileged person, he avoids almost everything in the way of social duties. In regard to all taxes, direct and indirect, he enjoys dispensations which are not without analogy to those formerly admitted to priests and nobles. The same thing holds good of married people who do not have children; they are, so to speak, encouraged by the law: it is a state of things which should not and cannot last.

[Sidenote: In principle identical with certain provisions at time of Revolution.]

By a tax on celibacy one would simply be reverting to the ideas of the French Revolution. The Revolution took care, by a number of laws, to favour the married man at the expense of the unmarried. Thus every celibate was ranked, for purposes of taxation, in a higher class than that to which, according to his income, he would have been placed had he been married. If he demanded assistance for some of the causes for which assistance was granted, he would be given but half the amount that a married man in his situation would have received; if he was more than thirty years old the laws obliged him to pay twenty-five per cent. additional to all ground tax; the taxable value of his property was estimated at fifty per cent. higher than it would otherwise have been. A manufacturer was obliged to declare whether he was celibate or married. The law considered every man a celibate who was thirty years old and was not married, or a widower.[103]

[103] See the _Études sur le célibat en France_, by Dr. G.
Lagneau (Académie des sciences morales et politiques, p. 835,
1885.)

[Sidenote: Parents should be taxed inversely to number of children.]

Over and above the special tax on celibacy, a more equitable distribution of the tax on families might be realized. As M. Richet remarks, if the father of a family cannot be assisted by indirect taxes, the direct tax on him should at least be inversely proportional to the number of his children.[104] Not only so, but compulsory road labour—this unpopular tax, which constitutes the last vestige of the _corvée_—might well be suppressed entirely for the fathers of more than four or even of more than three children.[105]