Then, in the second place, posters might be used. Certain speeches delivered in the Chamber or the Senate have a much feebler title to be placarded on the walls of remote villages than such and such economical, statistical, and geographical information. In the country placarding might be supplemented by viva voce reading by some important functionary of the village, or even by the public crier. The Bulletin des Communes, if it were composed more carefully than it is and filled with examples, might be read every Sunday in front of the town hall. If the schoolmaster were intrusted with this function the reading would be the germ of a weekly conference, which considering the emptiness and monotony of country life might well succeed in attracting a certain number of the public. Statistical and economical information on the depopulation of certain provinces; on the dangers of such depopulation; on the enormous growth of the English, German, and Italian peoples; on the social consequences of the enfeeblement of a race—might thus be placarded, read aloud, and commented on in order to call to the attention of everyone the economical and political ruin which is menacing us. The influence of religious instruction is diminishing; it is essential to supply its place by a moral and patriotic education which shall combat prejudice, egoism, imprudence, and false prudence.
Tastes of parents and of children not the same.
One of the commonest psychological illusions that a better education might dispel is the belief that one’s children are going to depend for their happiness on precisely the same circumstances that constitute one’s own happiness. A miser, whose happiness consists in adding to his wealth, does not perceive that his posterity will not lay the same emphasis that he does on the possession of an immense and undivided capital. The peasant, who has passed his life in rounding out his plot of ground, by obtaining here a bit and there a bit of real estate at the expense of infinite stratagem, conceives his son as finding his highest happiness in a continuation of the same process. His vision does not stretch beyond the hedge that bounds his own meadow, or rather the hedge that bounds the neighbouring meadow which he is ambitious to acquire. A village butcher will have but one child, so that he may make him a butcher like himself, and his successor; if he had two, the second might be forced to become a baker or a carpenter or a locksmith. What a misfortune!—how could one consent to live if one were not a butcher! The idle man of leisure, who passes the first forty years of his life between women and horses, dreams of nothing better for his heir than idleness. Those, on the contrary, who feel such and such a thorn in their present mode of life imagine that they are securing perfect happiness for their son if they secure him an immunity from that particular source of suffering. The hard-working day labourer, the small shopkeeper, the functionary who has laboured all his life ten or twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and has never had but one desire in his life—that of taking his fill of rest—imagines that his son will naturally be much happier than himself if he does not have to work so much. Ninety-five per cent. of the human race are bound to hard labour and imagine that the pinnacle of happiness would be to do nothing. The majority are absolutely ignorant of the fact that, other things equal, happiness is never exactly proportionate to wealth, and that, according to one of Laplace’s theorems, if fortune should increase by geometrical progression, happiness would increase by arithmetical progression; the millionaire controls but a fraction more happiness than a workman who makes enough to live on. And too, wealth is never known at its best except by the man who has made it, who knows what it is worth, who looks upon it with the satisfaction of an artist contemplating his work, of a house-owner examining his house, of a peasant measuring his field. A fortune is always more precious to the man who has got it together than to his son, who will perhaps dissipate it. If there is one axiom that fathers ought to take the trouble to master, it is this: A robust, intelligent young man with the advantage of a good education, which to-day is indispensable, runs a greater chance of being happy in life if he is busy, and he will not be busy if a fortune is handed to him when he comes of age. If a young man is to be made happy, the surest means is not to give him a fortune but to supply him with an opportunity of acquiring one, if fortune be his aim.[112]
Relation between ample means of subsistence and population.
The peasantry and the middle classes of France, when they become more enlightened, will begin to understand that the universe stretches beyond their village or their street; that their children, when once they have been sufficiently educated, will have a multitude of careers open to them, and notably that of emigration to the colonies. Whenever a limitless field of action is thrown open to a race, its birth-rate increases. People who live near unoccupied land, or who see numerous careers open to their children, are like people who live on the coast in the presence of the wealth of the ocean. What is the explanation of the well-known fertility of the fishing population, even in France? It has been attributed to differences of food; it is more probably due, as has been remarked, to the fact that the produce of fishing is proportionate to the number of fishermen and that the sea is large enough and deep enough for all.
Summary.
To sum up, the relation of religious beliefs to the maintenance of the race is the foundation of one of the gravest problems that the decline of Christianity gives rise to. If we have insisted at length upon this problem, the reason is that it is almost the only one in regard to which neither morals nor politics have as yet seriously attempted to supply the place of religion. In regard to such questions morals have hitherto been afraid to insist, and politics have been unpardonably negligent. Religion alone is afraid of nothing and has neglected nothing. This state of things must be changed; some solution must be found for so vital a problem—a problem which becomes every year more and more vital as instinct declines in power and reflective intelligence becomes stronger.[113] Shall we be obliged some day to adopt the most radical imaginable solution; shall those who have no children be obliged to pay for the rearing and education of the children of those who have many? No; before reaching so extreme a point as that a number of palliatives will have been tried, and we have endeavoured to suggest some of them. What is essential is that politics, morals, education, and hygiene should all do their duty in this matter, in especial since religion is nowadays beginning to be powerless in it. Science must do in the future what religion has done in the past; must secure the fertility of the race and its physical, moral, and economical education.