Chapter VII (2)

[104] “Direct taxes,” says M. Javal, “are in a great measure a
tax on children: compulsory road labour is forced on young men
before they are adult. The tax on doors and windows is a tax on
air and light, the inconvenience of which increases directly
with the increase in the size of the family and the consequent
necessity of occupying a larger apartment. The license itself,
which applies to the amount of the rent of one’s habitation,
is in a great measure proportional to the necessary expenses
and not to the resources of the person taxed.” (_Revue
scientifique_, No. 18, November 1, 1884, p. 567.) “It is well
known,” says M. Bertillon, “that the city of Paris pays to
the state the tax on apartments that rent for less than four
hundred francs. In principle nothing could be better, but in
practice: suppose two neighbours, one of them an unmarried
man, possesses a comfortable lodging of two rooms with the
accessories; one of these two rooms can scarcely be called a
necessity for him and is distinctly a simple addition to his
comfort, and the city pays his tax. His neighbour has a family
and four children, and lives in three rooms which constitute
a very narrow, and hardly a sufficient lodging, but the rent
of it is five hundred francs and the unhappy man must pay: (1)
Six times greater taxes on what he consumes than his neighbour;
(2) A furniture tax; (3) Some portion of the tax that the city
pays on the apartment of the celibate neighbour. Evidently
the result is precisely the opposite of what it should be.”
(Bertillon, _La statistique humaine de la France_.)

[105] If a purse should be given by the state to one of every
seven children in the same family (according to a law at the
time of the Revolution which has recently been revived and
corrected) it would be no more than justice, nay, it would be
almost an act of simple reparation; although it must not be
supposed that the practical results would be considerable.
The benefit that it would do to the father of the family is
too uncertain, and the prospect of such an advantage could
influence only a man who had six children and was hesitating
about the seventh; but he who has had six children is not a
follower of Malthus and is not likely to be.

[Sidenote: Injustice of present law of inheritance.]

Everybody is agreed nowadays as to the defects in the law regulating the taxation of inheritances. We believe that it is more than anything else by a modification of this law that the practice of malthusianism can be checked. The tax on every inheritance which is to be divided up among a great number of children ought as far as possible to be reduced, whereas the tax on inheritances which are to go undivided to a single inheritor ought to be increased. The small proprietor who limits himself to one child, in order to avoid dividing his field, would soon learn that he is making a bad calculation if by that very act he subjects his estate to a heavy tax. On the contrary, whoever lays out his fortune in rearing a number of children would at least have the satisfaction of thinking that almost the whole of his fortune could be handed down to them, that the public treasury would take little of it, and that if his property had to be divided after his death it would at least not be seriously diminished; almost nothing would “go out of the family.”[106]

[106] Suppose, to take almost the first figures that occur to
one, that the law taxed an only son’s inheritance twenty per
cent.; it might tax an inheritance to be handed down to two
children only fifteen per cent., an inheritance to be handed
down to three children ten per cent., to four children eight
per cent., to five children six per cent., to six children
four per cent., to seven children two per cent., and to any
greater number of children nothing. Remark that this gradation
actually exists to-day but inversely, because just in so far
as an inheritance has to be divided up among a large number
of children, the expenses of the sale and partition tend to
increase and the value of the property, which is thus split up
into bits, tends to decrease. A number of cases may be cited in
which inheritances that had to be divided among seven or eight
children have lost, by partition, not only twenty but even
twenty-five or fifty per cent. of their value. On the contrary,
an inheritance transmitted to a single inheritor is burdened
with the direct tax only, and that amounts at most to ten per
cent. Here, as elsewhere, the law protects small families and
encourages sterility.

[Sidenote: Tax on inheritances falling to celibates.]

Every reform of the law of inheritance must make up its account with the two motives which alone inspire a man to amass a fortune: a personal interest, and an interest in his wife and children. So that, whenever a man is a widower without children, his property might be made subject at his death to a considerable tax, without his industry, which society is interested in stimulating, being thereby especially discouraged. A considerable tax therefore on the property left by celibates, and married couples without children, would be evidently equitable, and, no more than in the case of a tax on celibacy, to be regarded as a penalty. The simple fact is that a man who has not reared children has expended much less of his income for the benefit of society, and that society has the right during his lifetime or at his death to trim the scales against him. Indeed proportionate taxation ought positively to be a matter of conscience with society.

[Sidenote: French law of inheritance tends toward minute subdivision of estates.]

Given the importance of large fortunes in modern society, religion and the patriarchal spirit together devised in former times a compromise between the necessity of having a large family and of keeping the family possessions undivided; I refer to primogeniture. To attempt to re-establish the law of primogeniture in nations which have rejected it would be impracticable and unjust, even though one should recognize that the traditional superstition and prejudices on this point were not without some justification. But, to reassure those who dislike the thought of the inevitable partition of their territorial possessions, the present laws in regard to inheritances might be made less stringent. Every land-owner, every owner of a factory or a commercial house, might be left free to designate which of his children he considered most competent to succeed him in the possession of such real property, and the law of partition might be considered as applicable to the rest of his property only. It would be a sort of liberty of bequest, within the limits of the family. The authors of our civil code broke the line of succession as it had existed in the families of the nobility; and they did well, in that they dispersed masses of unproductive capital, and by that very fact rendered them productive; but they did less well, in that they rendered it difficult to bequeath large farming or manufacturing establishments from father to son. They have necessitated the subdivision of capitals which were much more productive in their entirety; and as a result families of farmers and manufacturers who remain, from father to son, for generations in the same pursuit and are thereby enabled to carry it to its highest degree of perfection, have almost disappeared in France. Such commercial or land-owning dynasties constitute the greatness of England and of Germany. A great commercial house or a great farming enterprise is not to be created in a day, and if after one’s death one’s labour is to be destroyed by partition, so much the worse for the country. Le Play has depicted in lively colours the despair of the farmer who has laboured all his life to perfect a system of cultivation, of the manufacturer who has created a prosperous house, who see their work menaced with destruction if they have a number of children. Such men have but one resource; to withdraw enough money from their business to satisfy the requirements of the law in regard to the children who are not to succeed them, and thus to prevent the sale of their establishment. The result of this manœuvre often is that the child who inherits this establishment is left too poor to carry on the business and finds ruin where his father found wealth. The law, in its endeavour to divide the produce of the father’s labour among his children, too often annihilates the most valuable part of the father’s labour; in the effort to obtain an apparent equity in the partition of the revenues, it destroys the source of them. The law cuts down the tree to gather the fruit.

[Sidenote: Large families should be partly exempted from military service.]

Military service, which is perhaps the heaviest burden that the state lays on the individual, also constitutes the state’s principal means of influencing him. The most Malthusian native of Normandy would become amenable at once if a question of five years’ military service, more or less, were involved. To-day the father of four living children is exempt from the twenty-eight days’ military service (the law does not seem to be well known, but ought to be); he ought to be exempt from all reserve service, even in time of war. Similarly, as has already been demanded, a family which has furnished two soldiers to the army ought to be exempt from further military duty. The younger sons should be definitively excused from military service by the fact of their two elder brothers having marched under the flag. As a matter of fact, families in which there are more than two sons are so rare that such a measure would hardly diminish the annual recruits.[107] More than that the Budget is unequal to the needs of the whole number of possible recruits even as the case stands; it is therefore irrational to make one’s selection from among them by an appeal to chance. Such a device is an appeal to inequality and that under the disguise of equality and law; the future of every society depends upon the decreasing part played in it by the injustices of chance. The military service required of each family should therefore be regulated with some rational reference to the number of children in it.[108]

[107] M. Javal in 1885 proposed, in the Chamber, to substitute
for Article 19 of the commission another article, according
to the terms of which when two or three sons of the same
family were enrolled they should be held to only three years
of service all told, and that when there were more than three
brothers enrolled they should each be required to give but
one year’s service. The amendment was due to the fact that
population in France is not increasing.

[108] Young soldiers also, as M. Richet says, might be
permitted to marry under certain conditions. They are precisely
at the age when fertility is at its greatest.

[Sidenote: Emigration to be encouraged.]

Emigration tends to augment fertility; emigration must therefore be favoured by law. It is soberly estimated at present that from thirty to forty thousand Frenchmen emigrate each year; the figure is relatively small, but that number of emigrants a year is enough to settle important colonies.[109] It is unscientific to maintain at this late day that the French are incapable of colonizing when they have so powerfully aided in forming the great English colonies in Canada, India, and Egypt and are actually colonizing Algeria and Tunis. What we lack is not the ability to establish colonies, but the habit of emigration. Emigration, in spite of its importance for us, obtains mainly in certain poor districts in France; it is not general enough to have any considerable influence, as yet, in raising the birth-rate; the law should here be looked to, to correct the habits of the people. In England out of every family of four sons it is almost to be expected that one of them will go to India, another to Australia, a third to America; there is nothing surprising in it, it is the custom. A sense of distance is almost unknown on the opposite side of the Channel. In France, if a single child leaves the country, even as the secretary of an embassy, he is as solemnly bid good-bye as if he were going never to return, as if he were dying even. There is a great deal of prejudice and ignorance in paternal anguish of this kind. Such and such a sedentary profession, for example that of a physician, is subject to perils that are perfectly well known to statisticians and which we nevertheless do not hesitate to choose for our children precisely because it permits them to live next door to us, rather than at the other end of the world. Such national prejudices will give way before education, the increasing habit of travelling, and the progressively rapid circulation of society; laws might favour it. The spirit of enterprise and colonization, which seems at first sight so foreign to love of family, is capable of being allied with it; nay, becomes, under certain circumstances, the very condition of it. To rear a numerous family is always in a certain sense to colonize, even though all the children live within the limits of their native country. To rear a large family is to launch one’s children upon unknown ways, and demands the activity of mind and fertility of resource which are of the essence of colonization. The creation of a numerous family is positively a social enterprise, as the creation of a great commercial house or a great farming industry is an economical enterprise; success in both cases demands constant effort and brings a various profit in return. Suppose a couple have reared ten children to labour and honesty; the children form a protecting phalanx about the parents and give them, in return for the rearing, if not gross and direct benefits, at least happiness and honour. We do not wish to disguise the fact, however, that to rear a family involves a certain amount of risk; but every enterprise involves a risk. And indeed the prime need in this whole matter is to develop the spirit of enterprise and audacity which was formerly so powerful in the French nation. A great many people to-day remain celibate for the same reason that they are content to live within a small income without endeavouring to increase their fortune by investing it in commerce or manufacture; they are afraid of the risks of the family, just as they are afraid of commercial risks. They consume instead of producing, because producing is inseparable from a certain preliminary investment of money and activity. Similarly a great many people, once they are married, endeavour, so to speak, to reduce marriage to a minimum; they do not dare to have children; they are afraid of the preliminary outlay, they are afraid of emerging from the shell of their short-sighted egoism.

[109] Rightly to appreciate the ability of France to maintain
colonies, this figure must not be compared with the rate of
emigration from other countries, but with the average excess of
births over deaths in France. Thus considered, the number of
forty thousand emigrants (adopted by M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu)
becomes relatively large, since the annual excess of our births
is not one hundred thousand.

[Sidenote: To French colonies.]

It is, of course, emigration to French colonies that the law ought especially to favour, and for that purpose there is one respect in which the military law should be reformed. As a matter of fact, in spite of the law of July 27, 1872, the government is obliged to grant pardon to the numerous Basques and Savoyards who emigrate to escape military service. More than that, the sole important current that exists in France flows toward foreign colonies, and often creates on their shores industries which rival our own, while they rarely open advantageous markets for our commerce. Is it not a matter of urgent necessity to make our colonies as attractive to the French emigrants as the colonies of any foreign nationality? If the young man of twenty who has made up his mind to pass some years of his life in Brazil finds himself _de facto_ exempt from military service, ought he not to be _de jure_ exempt if he wishes to emigrate to Algiers, to Tunis, to Tonquin, to Madagascar? Emigration is itself a sort of military service. Colonists defend and enlarge the frontiers of the countries; a really rational law should recognize them as a portion of the military power of the country. Fifty-four chambers of commerce in our principal cities, “considering that it is of the greatest importance to encourage, by every means possible, intelligent and well-educated young people, intending to emigrate, to establish themselves in our colonies,” demanded justly “that, in times of peace, young men residing in the colonies should be granted a delay of five years in the call to military service, a delay which should become a definitive exemption after a further residence of five consecutive years.” We believe that this period of ten years might be shortened, and that a residence of seven years in the colonies, or even of five in certain distant colonies, like Tonquin, might be infinitely more profitable to the mother country than a three-years’ military service at home.[110] We are much less in need of soldiers to guard our colonies than of colonists; indeed our colonies are too often “colonies without colonists.” More than that, we travel too little, we are not as well acquainted as we should be with our own possessions; whoever had spent five of the most active years of his life in the colonies would be tempted to return there or to send his friends and relatives there. An amendment, looking to this exemption from military service, was discussed in the Chamber of Deputies in May and June, 1884. If it should ever be passed, it might have a considerable influence upon the destinies of the French people.[111]

[110] The legal minimum of required residence should not be
taken as representing the real duration of actual residence:
people do not come back from distant countries merely for the
wishing; but the legislature should take advantage of the
psychological effect of a definite figure; an emigrant rarely
leaves France without a determination to be gone only so long.
The majority of the Basques who emigrate in such large numbers
to America expect to return soon; three-fourths of them become
good citizens of the Argentine Republic.

[111] Among the secondary causes which tend to lower the
French birth-rate, and which the law might counteract, let
us notice that of abortion, which is practised in France not
less commonly than in Germany, but bears much worse results
here than there, because of the small number of children that
are born in France. Paris positively enjoys a reputation for
the art of miscarriage, and ladies come there from various
parts of the world to be relieved of their children. “One of
the professors of our schools said this year, in one of his
courses, that a midwife had confessed to him that she produced
on an average one hundred miscarriages a year.” (Dr. Verrier,
_Revue scientifique_, June 21, 1884.) Pajot affirms that there
are more miscarriages than births. Might not this state of
things be remedied: 1. By the re-establishment of the revolving
boxes (_tours_); 2. By a more constant inspection of the books
and offices of midwives and accoucheurs, such as furnished
lodgings in Paris are subject to.

Among the principal reasons which prevent marriage let us
mention the preliminary formalities, which are too numerous
even when both parties are French, and are simply numberless
when one party is a foreigner. The law of marriages when
both parties are French ought to be simplified to the utmost
possible extent, so that an impatience of the preliminaries
could in nowise influence engaged couples. More than that
every effort should be made to facilitate marriages between
French subjects and foreigners, unions the results of which are
generally good for the race and which are hindered by all sorts
of legal obstacles in certain countries; this last question is
a subject to be dealt with by diplomacy. Still other causes
that the law might modify operate in France, if not to diminish
the birth-rate, at least—what amounts to the same thing—to
increase the mortality among children. In the first place is to
be reckoned the employment of wet-nurses, who should be subject
to a much more rigorous surveillance than they are at present,
under the Roussel law. In the second place, there is the
deplorable condition of illegitimate children, the mortality
among whom is greater in France than in any other country:
some of them are reported as stillborn, who medical statistics
would go to show are the victims of murder; others die of
hunger in the second week of their birth owing to negligence or
cruelty on the part of the mother. The re-establishment of the
revolving boxes (_tours_) would here also be of prime service.
In the third place, let us mention the exceptional mortality in
France of adults from twenty to twenty-five years of age, which
must result from bad administration in the army. Legislators
and administrators should direct their attention simultaneously
to all these points, if they are to check the current of
depopulation in France.

[Sidenote: Dangers of depopulation should be taught.]

III. Apart from the laws, the great means of influencing races is public education: it is by that means that the ideas and feelings may be moulded. The French people must be enlightened, therefore, on the disastrous consequences of depopulation; sentiments of patriotism, of honour, of duty, must in every possible way be appealed to. The schoolmaster, the physician, and the mayor may all be of help. There are a whole multitude of such means of instruction that are being neglected.

[Sidenote: In the army by conferences.]

In the first place there are military conferences. Conferences of a half hour each, with striking facts and examples and a few significant figures, might exercise a considerable influence on the army, which is to-day the nation. Military conferences will some day certainly be one of the great means for the dissemination of knowledge; they have recently been employed with success in Belgium during the strikes, to inculcate notions of political economy in the army and to fortify the military against certain communistic arguments.

[Sidenote: In the country by proclamations.]

Then, in the second place, posters might be used. Certain speeches delivered in the Chamber or the Senate have a much feebler title to be placarded on the walls of remote villages than such and such economical, statistical, and geographical information. In the country placarding might be supplemented by _viva voce_ reading by some important functionary of the village, or even by the public crier. The _Bulletin des Communes_, if it were composed more carefully than it is and filled with examples, might be read every Sunday in front of the town hall. If the schoolmaster were intrusted with this function the reading would be the germ of a weekly conference, which considering the emptiness and monotony of country life might well succeed in attracting a certain number of the public. Statistical and economical information on the depopulation of certain provinces; on the dangers of such depopulation; on the enormous growth of the English, German, and Italian peoples; on the social consequences of the enfeeblement of a race—might thus be placarded, read aloud, and commented on in order to call to the attention of everyone the economical and political ruin which is menacing us. The influence of religious instruction is diminishing; it is essential to supply its place by a moral and patriotic education which shall combat prejudice, egoism, imprudence, and false prudence.

[Sidenote: Tastes of parents and of children not the same.]

One of the commonest psychological illusions that a better education might dispel is the belief that one’s children are going to depend for their happiness on precisely the same circumstances that constitute one’s own happiness. A miser, whose happiness consists in adding to his wealth, does not perceive that his posterity will not lay the same emphasis that he does on the possession of an immense and undivided capital. The peasant, who has passed his life in rounding out his plot of ground, by obtaining here a bit and there a bit of real estate at the expense of infinite stratagem, conceives his son as finding his highest happiness in a continuation of the same process. His vision does not stretch beyond the hedge that bounds his own meadow, or rather the hedge that bounds the neighbouring meadow which he is ambitious to acquire. A village butcher will have but one child, so that he may make him a butcher like himself, and his successor; if he had two, the second might be forced to become a baker or a carpenter or a locksmith. What a misfortune!—how could one consent to live if one were not a butcher! The idle man of leisure, who passes the first forty years of his life between women and horses, dreams of nothing better for his heir than idleness. Those, on the contrary, who feel such and such a thorn in their present mode of life imagine that they are securing perfect happiness for their son if they secure him an immunity from that particular source of suffering. The hard-working day labourer, the small shopkeeper, the functionary who has laboured all his life ten or twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and has never had but one desire in his life—that of taking his fill of rest—imagines that his son will naturally be much happier than himself if he does not have to work so much. Ninety-five per cent. of the human race are bound to hard labour and imagine that the pinnacle of happiness would be to do nothing. The majority are absolutely ignorant of the fact that, other things equal, happiness is never exactly proportionate to wealth, and that, according to one of Laplace’s theorems, if fortune should increase by geometrical progression, happiness would increase by arithmetical progression; the millionaire controls but a fraction more happiness than a workman who makes enough to live on. And too, wealth is never known at its best except by the man who has made it, who knows what it is worth, who looks upon it with the satisfaction of an artist contemplating his work, of a house-owner examining his house, of a peasant measuring his field. A fortune is always more precious to the man who has got it together than to his son, who will perhaps dissipate it. If there is one axiom that fathers ought to take the trouble to master, it is this: A robust, intelligent young man with the advantage of a good education, which to-day is indispensable, runs a greater chance of being happy in life if he is busy, and he will not be busy if a fortune is handed to him when he comes of age. If a young man is to be made happy, the surest means is not to give him a fortune but to supply him with an opportunity of acquiring one, if fortune be his aim.[112]

[112] We conceive, for example, that a father who proposes
to enrich his son might often do well to take as the measure
of his generosity the sum that his son can lay by, and does
really lay by, during a year of labour. The father might double
or even sextuple that sum, but he ought at least to make it
the basis of his calculations instead of taking counsel with
some vague and often deceptive notion of equality, or with his
affection for his child, which is often an extreme instance
of inequality. We know a young man who at his twenty-eighth
year had already amassed by ten years of labour forty thousand
francs; his parents tripled the amount.

[Sidenote: Relation between ample means of subsistence and population.]

The peasantry and the middle classes of France, when they become more enlightened, will begin to understand that the universe stretches beyond their village or their street; that their children, when once they have been sufficiently educated, will have a multitude of careers open to them, and notably that of emigration to the colonies. Whenever a limitless field of action is thrown open to a race, its birth-rate increases. People who live near unoccupied land, or who see numerous careers open to their children, are like people who live on the coast in the presence of the wealth of the ocean. What is the explanation of the well-known fertility of the fishing population, even in France? It has been attributed to differences of food; it is more probably due, as has been remarked, to the fact that the produce of fishing is proportionate to the number of fishermen and that the sea is large enough and deep enough for all.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the relation of religious beliefs to the maintenance of the race is the foundation of one of the gravest problems that the decline of Christianity gives rise to. If we have insisted at length upon this problem, the reason is that it is almost the only one in regard to which neither morals nor politics have as yet seriously attempted to supply the place of religion. In regard to such questions morals have hitherto been afraid to insist, and politics have been unpardonably negligent. Religion alone is afraid of nothing and has neglected nothing. This state of things must be changed; some solution must be found for so vital a problem—a problem which becomes every year more and more vital as instinct declines in power and reflective intelligence becomes stronger.[113] Shall we be obliged some day to adopt the most radical imaginable solution; shall those who have no children be obliged to pay for the rearing and education of the children of those who have many? No; before reaching so extreme a point as that a number of palliatives will have been tried, and we have endeavoured to suggest some of them. What is essential is that politics, morals, education, and hygiene should all do their duty in this matter, in especial since religion is nowadays beginning to be powerless in it. Science must do in the future what religion has done in the past; must secure the fertility of the race and its physical, moral, and economical education.

[113] See _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_,
p. 53, and _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, 2e partie.

Part Third.

NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.