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]
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.
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.
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.