The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women of the lower classes fear labour.