The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

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]

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.

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.

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]

Emigration to be encouraged.