IV. Of Measures that will be Effective.—The evil must be fought in its causes. These causes are detestable family customs, dictated by pecuniary considerations. These being the things to be reformed, and money being the cause of them, the beginning should be made with money. We have a right to demand energetic measures, severe if necessary, against the evil that is eating France. Those which we shall ask for here are only equitable. They shall fully respect individual liberty, and in some cases augment it. Their purpose is to teach the French people who do not know it the immense wrong which their mistaken selfishness is inflicting upon the country. They aim especially to modify customs, and to invoke for reasonably numerous families the profound respect and protection that are due them. And they seek to harmonize general with particular interests, a thing to which the present laws have precisely the contrary effect.
It is just as much every man's duty to contribute to the perpetuity of his country as it is to defend it. This is a moral truth which the French have forgotten, and it will have to be inculcated in them. The case is beyond the reach of the most eloquent sermons, and will have to be met, if the mass of men are to be convinced, by palpable facts that will touch all personally. This leads to the principle, which seems, moreover, self-evident, that the fact of bringing up a child should be considered a form of tax payment. The payment of a tax is, in fact, the imposition of a pecuniary sacrifice for the profit of the whole nation. This is what the father accepts who rears a child.
A family, to be acquitted of the tax, should rear at least three children. It takes two children to fill the place of the parents, and there should be a third in addition, for one in three families, on an average, will have no children. Hence the family which does not rear three children will fail of imposing sufficient sacrifices upon itself for the future of the nation. It is free to do this, but should pay damages for it. He, on the other hand, who rears more than three children imposes supplementary burdens upon himself, for which he should be recompensed every time occasion offers. The principle of a reduction of taxes proportioned to the number of children was applied in June, 1898, at the instance of the Alliance Nationale, by the city of Lyons. It has been adopted, very timidly at first, and then a little more broadly, by the Minister of Finance.[F] But it would be easy, and even necessary, to go considerably further in this direction.
To accomplish this reduction without the treasury losing anything, it is only necessary to charge the less prolific families with one fifth additional tax. The demographic condition of France is, in fact, so deplorable that families of more than three children form only one sixth part of the whole number, or are 2,122,210 out of 12,127,023; hence, in order to clear fully from liability for taxes these two million families, it is enough to charge the other ten million families with supplementary taxes of twenty per cent—a thing that is entirely practicable. It may, however, seem more expedient to scale the supplementary impost, so that it shall fall in inverse proportion to the number of children. Thus, let bachelors more than thirty years old pay fifty per cent; households without children, forty per cent; families with one child, thirty per cent; families with two children, ten per cent; families with three children, the present tax without addition; while families with more than three children should be wholly exempt. A simple calculation will show that the treasury would gain by such an adjustment. It would lose 2,122,210 contributors of taxes, and would gain, against these, 2,456,112. Furthermore, families with more than four children are usually poor and hardly able to pay even light assessments, while those we propose to tax supplementarily are mostly wealthy, whence the tax against them would be generally productive.
These scalings and exemptions might be applied to all the various kinds of direct taxes, so that the state should say, in effect, to the infertile families: "You have done a wrong to your country. We have no thought of punishing you for it, but it is not right that you profit by it. You must pay damages for it."
The plan actually followed by the state, instead of making lighter the meritorious burden which the head of a numerous family assumes, does everything to make it harder. All the direct and indirect taxes seem to fall higher upon families having many children. It would not be exact to say that the law is indifferent to natality. It would be more just to say that it does all it can to discourage it, and that every Frenchman is officially invited, in his own interest and that of his posterity, to limit it as much as possible. The contrary is what should be done.
There are wealthy families which are in a position to contribute most liberally to the perpetuity of the nation, and yet, strangely, they are the most abstemious. It would not be fair to tax them according to the number of servants they have, for this must increase as children multiply; but the tax might be adjusted to the excess of servants over children.
As an objection to our plan, it may be asked if we really believe that those "neo-Malthusian" families who have only one or two children will decide to have four in order to save themselves from some taxes? We do not cherish this illusion; but the sordidness of the family customs of the country should not be exaggerated. Most of the families sin through selfishness, while they do not realize that their selfishness is culpable, harmful, and ignoble. This must be made clear to them, and no method of publishing the fact is as imposing and effective as the tax-collector's schedule. The reform in direct taxes which we propose will therefore have an educational influence.
The same principle might be applied in the military service by expediting the discharge of soldiers who are married. A bill to this effect has been introduced in the French Senate, and an amendment has been proposed extending the favor to the eldest son of a family of five children.