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.
[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.
[113] See Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 53, and Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie.
[114] See M. Goblet d’Alviella, L’évolution religieuse. Anglo-Saxon religious proselytism has achieved the distinction of contradicting and paralyzing itself. The Theosophist Society of the United States, in 1879, sent to India certain missionaries, or rather counter-missionaries, who were commissioned “to preach the majesty and glory of all ancient religions and to fortify the Hindu, the Cingalese, the Parsee, against all efforts to induce him to accept a new faith instead of the Vedas, of the Tri-Pitâka and of the Zend Avestâ.” In India and in the island of Ceylon these counter-missionaries have succeeded in bringing back to the primitive faith some thousands of converts to Christianity.
[115] L’évolution religieuse contemporaine, by M. Goblet d’Alviella, p. 411.
[116] See the secularist version of the Ite missa est.
[117] Indigent pupils are clothed and fed; the instruction is gratuitous; the school contains at present one hundred pupils, having begun with eight. An industrial museum is attached to it. The society also sends out district nurses to attend the sick in the poorer quarters of New York.
[118] See our Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction.
[119] The notion of the unknowable has been the subject of a lively discussion in England and in France. See on this point the work of M. Paulhan in the Revue philosophique, t. vi. p. 279.
[120] See our Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, 1st part.