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