CHAPTER VII.

THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF

THE RACE.

I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism

between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers

for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity

of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior

races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to

the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction

of the number of births physiological, moral, or

economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.

II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious

powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The

influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of

small families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the

law in regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform

of the law of inheritance—Reform of the military law for

the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting

emigration to the French colonies.

III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a

substitute for religious sentiment.

One of the most important of the problems to which the gradual

enfeeblement of the religious sentiment has given rise is that of

race fertility and the question of population. Almost all religions

have attached a considerable importance to the rapid increase of

population. With the diminution of the influence of religions among the

superior races of mankind, shall we not lose an important aid in their

maintenance and multiplication?

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Antagonism between wealth and population.]

I. In the beginning, for the earliest aggregations of mankind, number

was a condition of power and consequently of security. The power of

wealth, which can be concentrated in the possession of a single man,

did not, so to speak, exist. In our days wealth has become a power

which is sufficient unto itself, and which division and distribution

often inevitably dissipate. Therein lies the source of the reasoning

which appeals nowadays to the heads of families: “To render a family

powerful one must transmit one’s capital in as undivided a state as

possible; that is to say, one must restrict the numbers of one’s

descendants to the utmost feasible limits.” Capital and capitalistic

egoism is therefore the enemy of population, because multiplication of

men always implies a more or less minute subdivision of wealth.

[Sidenote: Importance of rapid increase of population.]

Religion has always held the power of capital, in this respect, in

check. The Christian, the Hindu, the Mohammedan religion all correspond

to a state of things very different from that of the modern world; to

a state of society in which number constitutes a great power, in which

large families possess an immediate and visible utility. The greater

number of the great religions are at one in the precept: “Increase

and multiply.” According to the laws of Manou, one of the conditions

of salvation is the large number of male descendants. The religious

and national tradition of the Jews on the point is well known. Every

religion of Jewish origin being thus favourable to increase in the

size of the family, and expressly prohibiting means of prevention,

it follows that, other things equal, a sincerely Christian or Jewish

people will multiply more rapidly than a free-thinking people. The

infertility of the higher races, over and above the influence of the

opposition between religion and the modern spirit, is induced also by

a sort of antinomy between civilization and race propagation: rapid

civilization is always accompanied by a certain race corruption. This

antinomy must be remedied under penalty of extinction. Life is intense

in proportion to the number of young, ambitious people who engage

in it; the struggle for existence is fertile just so far as it is

carried on by young men rather than by men who are fatigued and who no

longer possess an enthusiasm for work; a young and rapidly increasing

nation constitutes a richer and more powerful organism, a steam-engine

working at a high pressure. One-half, perhaps three-fourths of the

distinguished men have come of numerous families; some have been the

tenth, some the twelfth child; to restrict the number of children is

to restrict the production of talent and genius, and that, too, out

of all proportion to the restriction of the family. An only son, far

from having, on the average, a greater number of chances of being a

remarkable man, really possesses fewer; in especial if he belongs to

the upper classes. “Both the mother and father, it has been said, watch

over this first child and enfeeble it by superfluous care, and spare

it, by yielding to its wishes, all moral gymnastic.” Every child who

expects to be the sole inheritor of a small fortune will put forth

less energy, in the struggle for existence, than he otherwise would.

And finally, it is a physiological fact that the first children are

often less vigorous and less intelligent; maternity is a function which

becomes perfect, as other functions do, by repetition; a mother’s first

effort is as rarely a masterpiece as a poet’s. To limit the number of

children is, therefore, in a certain measure to dwarf their physical

and intellectual powers.

[Sidenote: Fallacy of Malthusianism.]

As an increase of population heightens the intensity of the physical

and mental life of a nation, so also it heightens the intensity of the

economic life of a nation, stimulates the circulation of wealth, and

ultimately increases the public treasure instead of diminishing it. It

is happening under our very eyes in Germany and England, where public

wealth has increased side by side with the population. In Germany, in

a period of nine years (1872-1881), the average annual revenue of each

individual increased six per cent., while the population rolled up by

millions. The economical doctrine which regards overpopulation as the

principal cause of poverty is a very superficial one. As long as there

is an available plot of ground unoccupied, and perhaps even after the

entire earth shall be cultivated (for science may be able to create

new sources of wealth and even of food) a man will always constitute a

bit of living capital, of a higher value than a horse or a cow, and to

increase the numbers of citizens of a nation will be to increase the

sum of its wealth.[96]

[96] What economists have really established, and what MM.

Maurice Block, Courcelles-Seneuil, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Othenin

d’Haussonville are right in maintaining, is that it is harmful

to society to add to the non-working classes, to the number

of feeble beings who are incapable of labour, to the number

of beggars, and of non-combatants generally, whoever they may

be. Well, poverty favours the birth of those who are dependent

upon society, and the birth of those who are dependent upon

society tends still further to increase poverty; that is the

circle from which so many economists have believed that the

precepts of Malthus offered them an issue. Unhappily, if there

is one universal attribute of poverty, it is its fertility;

for in all nations the poorest classes are those that have the

greatest number of children. Malthus has never been listened to

by the poorer classes, but precisely by those only who, from

the point of view of a sagacious political economy, ought to be

encouraged to leave as many children behind them as possible,

because they alone would educate them well: that is to say, the

economical peasantry and the prosperous middle class. Insomuch

that a fertility of the poor is absolutely without remedy

(except by way of charity or emigration); but it constitutes in

the end a much less considerable evil than the infertility of a

nation as a whole, and is an ultimate evil only because, in the

last analysis, it results in a genuine unproductivity. Poverty,

especially in the cities, rapidly kills out the most prolific

races.

[Sidenote: Menace to modern civilization.]

Formerly the struggle for existence between two races or nations ended

in a single violent crisis: the vanquished were massacred or reduced

to slavery, and slavery usually resulted in the gradual extinction

of the inferior race; it was a slow massacre. Famine, produced by

methodical devastation, achieved what war had begun—whole races

disappeared abruptly from the face of the globe and left not a trace

behind: the most recent and most striking example is that of the

great American empires of Mexico and Peru. Thus the strongest and

most intelligent races alone survived, and had only to confirm their

victory with all its consequences by clearing the earth before them.

Existence was a monopoly in the hands of the strong. It is no longer

so. To-day the vanquished are no longer massacred; on the contrary,

when an uncivilized country is conquered, it is supplied with good

laws, with police and hygiene. Inferior races increase and multiply

under the rule of superior races. The Cape negroes, the Chinese, the

negroes in the United States, and even the last surviving red-skins,

who seem disposed to-day to take heart, are examples of what I mean.

Well, the Orient contains, in the Chinese Empire, a veritable reservoir

of men, which some day or other will overflow the entire earth. In the

face of this compact multitude, which is increasing rapidly, and with

advancing civilization will increase more rapidly, the four or five

great nations of Europe, and the United States and Australia, seem

a small matter. The future of humanity depends mathematically upon

the proportions in which the more intelligent races are represented

in the complex composition of the man of the future. And every son of

one of the more highly endowed races of the globe, such as the French,

German, or English, commits a positive fault in not labouring for the

multiplication of his race; he contributes to lower the future level

of human intelligence. Men of science have already established it as

a law that the power of reproduction decreases with the increase of

cerebral activity, and that intelligent races reproduce themselves

with increasing difficulty; to augment this natural difficulty by a

voluntary restriction is daily to labour for the brutalization of the

human race.

[Sidenote: Duty of civilized races to multiply.]

The followers of Malthus, supposing that there at present exists an

equilibrium between population and the means of subsistence, look

with anxiety upon every new arrival in the world; but even admitting

that the struggle for existence has already reached that acute stage,

it might still be hoped that only the more intelligent would leave

children behind them. Malthus’ law should possess no force for the

educated men of Europe, who alone are acquainted with it, but only for

the negroes or the Chinese, who are absolutely ignorant of it. Malthus’

law is not meant for us; in reality it is not meant for anyone. By the

very fact that one is acquainted with it, and possesses foresight and

self-control enough to put it into practice, one proves that one stands

beyond the circle of its applicability. Malthusians, who endeavour to

apply to the reproduction of mankind the principles of animal-breeders,

forget that the dominant principle in all breeding is to favour the

multiplication of the superior species. One Durham bull is worth

ten common bulls. What is true of bulls and sheep is true of men: a

Frenchman, with the scientific and æsthetic aptitude of his race,

represents on the average a social capital a hundred times greater

than that represented by a negro, an Arab, a Turk, a Cossack, or a

Chinaman. To leave few French descendants, in order that Cossacks and

Turks may increase and multiply, is to commit an absurdity, even on

the principles of a Malthusian. Be it remembered that it was among the

Aryans, and in especial among the Greeks, that science and art worthy

of the name took their rise; from them they passed to the other Aryans,

and then to the other human races.

[Sidenote: Bad outlook for the future.]

Michelet compares the treasure of science and truth, amassed by the

human mind, to the egg that a slave carried into the Roman circus,

at the end of the entertainment, into the midst of the great lions,

who were gorged and asleep. If one of the wild beasts opened his eyes

and was seized once more by desire at sight of the man with the egg,

which is the symbol of human genius, the slave was lost. In our times

genius is infinitely less persecuted than heretofore, and is no longer

in danger of the arena or of the headsman, and it seems as if the

sacred egg out of which the future is to arise has nothing further to

fear; but this is a mistake. Precisely because the human mind is year

by year growing richer, its treasure is becoming so considerable, so

delicate, and difficult to preserve in its entirety, that it may well

be asked whether a succession of people sufficiently well endowed

will arise to retain and to augment the acquisitions of science. Up

to the present day those truths alone have survived the wear and tear

of time which were simple; at the present epoch the rapidity of the

progress of science may well make us anxious as to its permanence. The

extreme complexity of science may well make us fear that the peoples

of the future may not possess mental elevation enough to embrace it

in its entirety, and to add to it by a constant increase. Suppose,

for example, that the world should be reduced abruptly to Africa,

Asia, and South America, where the Spanish race has not yet produced

a single scientific genius; must not the scientific labours of our

century inevitably miscarry? Happily their safety is bound up with that

of certain great nations. The Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples to-day

cover the earth with their children and their colonies. But it is sad

to think that one of the three or four great European peoples, which

alone count for much in the progress of humanity, should be dancing

gaily toward annihilation.

[Sidenote: Danger from Asia.]

A fusion of races will sooner or later take place in humanity; it is

already taking place in the United States, and the perfection of means

of communication is hastening its consummation throughout the entire

world. Europe is pouring out its surplus upon America, Africa, and

Australia; Asia will some day overflow Europe and America; what is

taking place to-day, fifty years after the invention of railways, can

scarcely give us an idea of the mixture and amalgamation of races which

will some day be realized on the earth. Such a mixture, even though

it raise the level, in some small degree, of races intellectually

ill-endowed, may well abase the level of races intellectually

well-endowed, if the latter are greatly outnumbered by the former.

[Sidenote: Money the modern patent of nobility.]

It may be objected, it is true, that the superior races of mankind

may remain isolated in the midst of the multiplication of the other

branches of humanity in a sort of jealous aristocracy, served and

respected by those whom they dominate by their intelligence. This is

one of the dreams of M. Renan, who sees in the Chinese the future slave

of the Europeans—gentle, docile slaves, with just enough intelligence

to be marvellous industrial machines. Unhappily we have learned, to our

expense, that the Chinese are also excellent instruments of war. In the

industrial society in which we live, money constitutes, in the long

run, the basis of aristocracy. To-day money is the true force and title

of nobility. To lay up treasures demands a very average intelligence,

of which a great number of inferior people are no doubt capable: once

rich and they will be our equals; richer, they will be our superiors

and our masters. If they have money enough they can purchase every

privilege, even that of mixing their blood with ours, even that of

marrying our daughters and of confounding our race and theirs. The

only means by which intelligence can preserve its power is by means of

numbers. Genius itself must leave a posterity behind it, and in spite

of prejudice to the contrary, if we are to be eternal it must be by

means of our children rather than by our works.

[Sidenote: Religion of the family.]

Positivists propose to substitute a religion of humanity for existing

and rapidly disappearing religions; there is a still more accessible

religion, and more practical, and more useful, which was one of the

first religions of humanity: the religion of the family, the worship of

the little group of beings bound together by ties of blood and memory

and name and honour, which form an epitome of a nation; to permit one’s

family to die out or to diminish in number is to labour, to the extent

that in one lies, to diminish the power of one’s native country and

of humanity itself. Patriotism has been made a subject of ridicule,

but patriotism is a beautiful thing, and befitting in the head of a

household. Paternity in its completest sense, that is to say, the

responsibility for the education of a new generation from birth to the

age of manhood, is, after all, the surest element of patriotism, and is

within the reach of everyone.

[Sidenote: Gradual impoverishment of France.]

In France especially, as we have seen, the population question is an

important one, and should be insisted on. It has been said with reason

that France to-day is not threatened by a multitude of dangers, but

by one only, which actually constitutes a national peril: that of

extinction from lack of children.[97] A nation may increase its capital

in two ways; 1. By productive expenditure and productive labour; 2. By

the utmost possible diminution of both, of labour and of expenditure.

France has been employing the second means since the beginning of the

present century; she has been economizing in children and diminishing

the rapidity of the circulation of national life. She has, by this

process, amassed a great treasure, but the results of her economy

have been in part consecrated to the payment of an indemnity of five

billions, and in part to loans, as in Mexico, Turkey, and Egypt, and to

speculation of every kind, and the result of these blind economies has

been a gradual impoverishment.

[97] M. Richet.

[Sidenote: Classes in France that maintain the population.]

Over and above those who are unreflective, or who simply trust to

luck, there exists no considerable class of people in France, except

Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, who can be counted on to maintain

the race. There exists no doubt a certain number of _bons vivants_

who are determined to take their pleasure at all hazards, and who find

in the restriction of the family a limitation of their pleasure; but

they are rare. The disciples of Malthus are nowadays much more numerous

than those of Rabelais. People who have children, not out of pleasure

nor by chance, but out of patriotism and philosophy, are so rare that

they need not at present be taken into account. The more the property

in France is subdivided, the greater the number of small proprietors,

the fewer children there are. Since 1866 the agricultural inquiry

has demonstrated the invasion of Malthusianism and the progress of

voluntary infertility in almost every department _side by side with

the subdivision of the soil_. From that time on the movement has gone

forward unchecked. “In certain communes the words brother and sister

have almost fallen out of use. Primogeniture, which was abolished

in 1789, has been replaced by unigeniture.”[98] Labourers only are

anti-malthusians, and that out of carelessness for the future. A

Malthusian was one day remonstrating with a poor labourer, who was

the father of twelve children and ambitious to become the father of

a thirteenth. “What will you have?” said the latter, “it is the only

pleasure in the world that I get for nothing; I would not diminish it

on any account.”

[98] Toubeau, _La Répartition des impôts_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Power of religion to stimulate population.]

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]

[99] See M. Baudrillart, _Les Populations rurales de la

Bretagne_.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Futility of effort to bring about a return of religion.]

II. If the question is really one of a return to some traditional

religion or a gradual extinction of the race, free-thinkers may well

hesitate between a number of lines of conduct. They may, in the first

place, take refuge in resignation: “After me the Deluge.” Many of the

middle classes and a great number even of economists, who regard the

future of their race and of their country as much too distant to be

taken into account and consider present comfort as the sole rational

aim of man, accept this position. A more radical alternative is to

join the Church: both the Catholic and the Protestant churches, in

spite of the eccentricity of their legends, are useful as an aid in

making a nation numerous and strong and prolific; and the French

of all nations needs religion, so that, instead of endeavouring to

destroy the Christian faith, it is our duty to endeavour to propagate

it. There is an element of hypocrisy and even of cowardice in this

effort to revive a bygone error in the name of present utility. And

it involves the affirmation that error is at the bottom more useful

than truth, and that truth is fundamentally irreconcilable with the

continued existence of the human race—an affirmation which is somewhat

precipitate. Above all, the effort to arrest scepticism is simply

futile—futile for humanity, for a people, for a family. When it is

time to regret that certain things have been learned it is too late to

set about ignoring them. The French people, in especial, possess a fund

of incredulity which is based upon the practical and logical character

of their temperament: they rose in 1789 against the clergy, in the name

of liberty; nowadays they will struggle with the same stubbornness in

the name of comfort against the prescriptions of religion, against the

very instincts of human nature, and will make themselves sterile in

order to become rich without immoderate labour. The re-establishment

of religion is simply out of the question; sincerely religious men

themselves, if they happen also to be intelligent, recognize it. This

rational sterility, produced by a triumph of the intellect over natural

instinct and religious dogma, is a charming theme for declamation;

but declamation is also sterile, and does not date from yesterday; it

was tried before the Revolution and succeeded neither in augmenting

religious sensibility nor in diminishing French infertility. In a

pamphlet on the Erreurs de Voltaire, the Abbé Nonotte wrote in 1766:

“Present notions and practices on the subject of population are as

melancholy for morality as for statesmanship. People are content

nowadays with a single heir. Pleasure and libertinism carry the day.

The fortunes of a great number of the first families in Paris rest

on the shoulders of a single child. It was better in former times;

for families were not afraid of a number of children, and were not

so extravagant but that they could provide them with a means of

subsistence.”

[Sidenote: Inability of priest to cope with question of population.]

Neither the priest nor the confessor can be counted on. Has the priest

ever power enough, even in countries like Brittany where devotion is at

its height, to suppress the grossest vice; drunkenness, for example,

and that, too, among women? How can a priest be expected to maintain

an influence over men who confess hardly more than once a year—at

Easter? How can the priest, under such circumstances, be expected to be

really a governor of the conscience, and in especial a physician of the

soul? He receives a general confession from each of his parishioners,

he is in a hurry, he is obliged to restrict his attention to the

most enormous of the sins confessed to him, and the whole ends in

absolution, followed by communion. Some days afterward the men get

drunk again, and do just as they did before, till the year comes round.

Prejudices and habits are stronger than anything else.

[Sidenote: Pliancy of religion.]

They who, with the Abbé Nonotte, regard religion as the cure of all

evils, forget that religion itself is very compliant, that it can be

made to stand for a multitude of things. If the mass of the French

people should allow themselves to be persuaded by the Abbé Nonotte

and his disciples to return to the traditional faith, the traditional

faith itself would soon cease to be so austere. Confessors would

become more discreet. Are they not to-day obliged to tolerate polkas

and waltzes, and young people whirling about the room in each other’s

arms, which was formerly so severely prohibited? The letter of religion

remains in vain the same, the spirit of the worshippers changes. At the

present day Jesuits willingly close their eyes to the sterility of the

family; they have even been accused of whispering to advice for the

preservation of certain inheritances. Do you imagine that confessors

in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ask especially embarrassing questions?

Heaven can be compromised with.

[Sidenote: Even of Protestantism.]

This sort of tolerance, like all tolerance, will grow with time. Even

in Protestant families in which a more extreme rigidity reigns, the

spirit of the times is dominant. Orthodoxy is everywhere becoming less

ferocious, sterility is everywhere on the increase. Even clergymen do

not have as large families as formerly. Statistics on this head would

be very instructive; one might find in the very bosom of Protestantism

sterility increasing directly with liberalism of belief. If Darwin and

Spencer have partisans in the English clergy, and among the American

Protestants, why should not Malthus also? In especial, since Malthus

was a grave and religious man.

[Sidenote: Decrease of population encouraged by the Catholic Church.]

The Catholic religion has itself been guilty by its advocacy of

religious celibacy. In France one hundred and thirty thousand persons

of both sexes are devoted to celibacy.[100] It is to be regretted that

Catholicism, which during a number of centuries (in the time when

St. Sidonius Apollinaris, the son-in-law of the Emperor Avitus, was

Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand) did not impose celibacy upon ecclesiastics,

should have felt obliged later to exact it, and should have come to

consider absolute continence superior to marriage, contrary to all

physiological and psychological laws. “Continence as a profession,”

says M. Montesquieu, “has destroyed more men than pestilence and war

together. Every religious house constitutes a family which never gives

birth to a child, and which continues in existence only by adopting

children from without. Such houses are open like so many abysses, to

swallow up the future of the race.” Religious celibacy results in

another evil consequence: although priests do not to-day constitute

the élite of society, they are still among the most intelligent, the

best educated, the least ill-disposed members of society. And they

gaily consent to be annihilated, to disappear, and to leave, like the

heretics they used to burn, no trace behind. They form as constant a

drain on the body-politic as the victims of the Inquisition formed

during so many years in Spain. If we should count the sons only of

clergymen who have become distinguished or even great men, from Linnæus

to Wurtz and Emerson, we might see how much we lose by the celibacy of

our priesthood.

[100] Dr. Lagneau, _Remarques démographiques sur le célibat en

France_.

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

education.

[Sidenote: 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.

[101] Aristotle, _Politica_, ii. 6, 13.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Women of the lower classes fear labour.]

Even among the women of the people gestation and childbirth, being, as

they are, painful, are also objects of the liveliest repugnance and of

protestations of every kind. I have never seen a woman of the people

who did not complain at being pregnant and who would not have preferred

any other malady. _Ah! Nous ne faisons pas, nous recevons_—“We women

have no voice in the matter,” said one of them to me—“if but we

had!” She epitomized in a word the physiological and psychological

position of the poor woman. Those who have not had children, far from

complaining of it, congratulate themselves, and in any event they

rarely desire more than one.

[Sidenote: Large families among the poor traceable to ignorance.]

In Picardy and in Normandy, as M. Baudrillart remarks, a woman who has

many children is made the butt of raillery. And if other provinces

are less sterile, it is owing to religion or to ignorance. The women

have not yet become acquainted with Malthus. They know of but one

remedy against an evil that they fear—to keep out of the way of

their husbands. The wife of such and such a labouring man prefers a

beating to the risk of having another child: but as she is the weaker

she often succeeds in bringing upon herself both the beating and the

child. Fear of pregnancy is more often than is commonly believed the

cause of dissension in poor households, and for that matter in rich

households also. The instant a woman reasons, instead of submitting to

the law, she inevitably feels the disproportion that exists, for her,

between the pleasures of love and the pains of maternity. She must be

supplied with a new conception of duty, and that not simply in the way

of a religious obligation which the husband can ridicule but of a moral

obligation.

[Sidenote: Girls should be educated for maternity.]

Catholic education, as we have already remarked, does great harm in

rearing young girls in a false modesty, in never speaking to them of

the duties of marriage for fear of awakening their imagination in the

direction of their future husband. The actual result is precisely the

opposite of the calculated result. Young girls see nothing in marriage

but the future husband and unknown pleasures. They never think of any

matter of painful duty which they must accept in advance; they do

not consider children as a question of duty but of necessity simply,

they are actuated by but one ambition, that of diverting themselves.

Girls should be educated and prepared for motherhood; our present

education is adapted to the formation of nuns or old maids, sometimes

of courtesans, for we neglect early to inspire woman with a feeling of

duty for her proper function, which constitutes also a large portion of

all that is moral in her life—the duty of maternity. Happily, married

women cannot remain sterile simply by wishing it, their husbands must

become their accomplices; it is their husbands, who, in the last

resort, are responsible. If the husband, out of complaisance to his

wife or to his wife’s relatives, undertakes to be a Malthusian _malgré

lui_, he plays almost as ridiculous a rôle as that of Georges Dandin:

the man who permits himself to be dictated to in the matter of not

having children is almost as complaisant as the man who acknowledges

the children of other people.

[Sidenote: Paternal love tends to restrict the number of children.]

Another cause which explains the low birth-rate in France is that

paternal and maternal love is more tender and more exclusive there

than in other countries. The French family, whatever may be said

to the contrary, is much more closely united than the English or

German family: in it a sort of fraternity obtains between parents and

children. Members of a family separate with regret, and the ideal of

the father is to have so few children that he may always keep them by

him. We are too refined, too far advanced from a state of nature, to

submit without suffering to the rupture which puberty naturally brings

about in the animal family, to the flight of the young bird whose wings

are grown; we have not the courage to accept the dismemberment of the

household, far less to wish it as a necessity and, on the whole, a good

thing. This affection has of course its egoistic side, and it is on

that side that it results in sterility. Parents rear children less for

the children’s sake than for their own.

[Sidenote: Two legal remedies.]

Having thus passed in review the principal causes which restrict the

number of children in French families let us consider what influence

law and morals might exert in counteracting them. Legal reforms should

be directed especially toward the two following points: 1. Reform of

the law relating to filial duties (maintenance of parents); 2. Reform

of the law of inheritance; 3. Reform of the military law, so as to

favour numerous families and permit emigration to the French colonies.

[Sidenote: Present state of the law does not sufficiently protect

parents against ingratitude.]

Rearing children being a considerable trouble and expense it is

necessary that it should be made profitable, that it should be

converted into a species of loan for a long term of years. The law can

bring this about in various ways. French legislation has protected

children by a provision that their fathers cannot completely disinherit

them; it should also have protected fathers against children’s

ingratitude. It often happens, in the country especially, that after

an aged couple have reared a numerous generation they find themselves

dependent upon their sons or upon their sons-in-law and are ill-fed

and greeted with abuse. The law provides that children must maintain

their parents, no doubt, but maintenance may be supplied in a manner

which renders it little better than assassination. The law which has

endeavoured to establish the moral independence of the son as against

the father might well endeavour to establish on a firm basis the moral

independence of the parents themselves. If a father to-day cannot

disinherit his son, is it not shocking that a son should be able, in a

sense, to disinherit his father—to accept life, nourishment, education

from him and to give derision, abusive language, and sometimes blows

in return? Observers who have lived among the people, in especial in

country districts, uniformly bear witness to the deplorable situation

of certain old men who are obliged to beg on the highroad, or of

their neighbours, for means of support which are refused them in

their own houses. The present French law is helpless in the presence

of filial ingratitude which takes the form, not of overt act, but of

abusive language and disrespectful conduct. It annuls a donation made

to an ungrateful child, but it cannot annul the donation of life, and

ungrateful children benefit by the inability. A father should be able

to count at least on a certain minimum of revenue from his children,

whoever they may be.[102]

[102] We are not obliged here to enter into details of

administration. Perhaps it would be no more than just to give

parents their choice between living with their children,

which is often so painful, and an annual sum, proportional

to the salary and resources of the children. This sum might

be taxed by the state or the commune, and paid by it to the

father. Every head of a family would at once reflect that if

he some day becomes poor and has but one child he will have

but one source of income, whereas, if he has ten children,

he will have ten sources of income, and ten chances that one

of them may be considerable; as it would be if any of one’s

children should have become wealthy. A numerous family would

thus constitute a guarantee of independence for the father; on

the other hand, the more he expended in educating them, the

greater chance he would have of later obtaining an equivalent

return for it. In labouring for the augmentation of the social

capital he would thus be securing an insurance for his old

age. Even supposing that the execution of a law of this kind

should be difficult, the right of parents to some really active

gratitude on the part of their children should be recognized

and consecrated formally by the letter of the law, which should

prescribe a line of conduct for children and even fix a certain

appropriate ratio between their income and the amount of their

remittances to their parents. The law should even do what in

it lies to efface from the language, in especial in their

applicability to those who have generously fulfilled their

duties of paternity, the shameful words: _être à la charge de

ses enfants_—dependent on his children for support; the public

should be made accustomed to consider this sort of dependence

not as an accident to the children, and as a misfortune, and

almost a disgrace, to the parents, but as a natural consequence

of the relation of parent and child.

[Sidenote: The state owes parents a debt.]

If, as is probable, the principle of social insurance is ultimately

to prevail, and if a certain amount of the regular income of every

labourer is to be retained and laid by to form a provision for his

old age, which his employer or the state will increase in certain

proportions, we believe that it would be equitable to increase the

provision laid by for the father of a family in a larger ratio than

the provision laid by for a celibate. The father of a family having

done more for the state than the celibate—having contributed to the

state his time and trouble and expense in rearing certain members of

the new generation—it would be legitimate for the state to make a

restitution to him of some small portion of the money he has laid out

in a disinterested manner; in a manner which did not benefit him and

has benefited the state.

[Sidenote: Tax on celibacy.]

Meanwhile this consummation is somewhat distant, and there is a reform

immediately practicable: a tax on celibacy. Whenever this tax has been

mentioned it has been made the subject of universal ridicule; it has

been represented, as M. Ch. Richet remarked, as a sort of penalty,

a fine for not being willing or not being able to marry. This is a

very unfair statement of the case; the measure would be simply strict

justice. With anything like an equality in the matter of fortune

a celibate pays smaller taxes (indirect taxes, taxes on doors and

windows, etc.); and the tax of rearing a family, by which the married

man serves the state in a number of ways at once, the celibate avoids

altogether. The celibate therefore is an altogether privileged person,

he avoids almost everything in the way of social duties. In regard to

all taxes, direct and indirect, he enjoys dispensations which are not

without analogy to those formerly admitted to priests and nobles. The

same thing holds good of married people who do not have children; they

are, so to speak, encouraged by the law: it is a state of things which

should not and cannot last.

[Sidenote: In principle identical with certain provisions at time of

Revolution.]

By a tax on celibacy one would simply be reverting to the ideas of

the French Revolution. The Revolution took care, by a number of laws,

to favour the married man at the expense of the unmarried. Thus every

celibate was ranked, for purposes of taxation, in a higher class than

that to which, according to his income, he would have been placed had

he been married. If he demanded assistance for some of the causes for

which assistance was granted, he would be given but half the amount

that a married man in his situation would have received; if he was more

than thirty years old the laws obliged him to pay twenty-five per

cent. additional to all ground tax; the taxable value of his property

was estimated at fifty per cent. higher than it would otherwise have

been. A manufacturer was obliged to declare whether he was celibate or

married. The law considered every man a celibate who was thirty years

old and was not married, or a widower.[103]

[103] See the _Études sur le célibat en France_, by Dr. G.

Lagneau (Académie des sciences morales et politiques, p. 835,

1885.)

[Sidenote: Parents should be taxed inversely to number of children.]

Over and above the special tax on celibacy, a more equitable

distribution of the tax on families might be realized. As M. Richet

remarks, if the father of a family cannot be assisted by indirect

taxes, the direct tax on him should at least be inversely proportional

to the number of his children.[104] Not only so, but compulsory road

labour—this unpopular tax, which constitutes the last vestige of the

_corvée_—might well be suppressed entirely for the fathers of more

than four or even of more than three children.[105]

[104] “Direct taxes,” says M. Javal, “are in a great measure a

tax on children: compulsory road labour is forced on young men

before they are adult. The tax on doors and windows is a tax on

air and light, the inconvenience of which increases directly

with the increase in the size of the family and the consequent

necessity of occupying a larger apartment. The license itself,

which applies to the amount of the rent of one’s habitation,

is in a great measure proportional to the necessary expenses

and not to the resources of the person taxed.” (_Revue

scientifique_, No. 18, November 1, 1884, p. 567.) “It is well

known,” says M. Bertillon, “that the city of Paris pays to

the state the tax on apartments that rent for less than four

hundred francs. In principle nothing could be better, but in

practice: suppose two neighbours, one of them an unmarried

man, possesses a comfortable lodging of two rooms with the

accessories; one of these two rooms can scarcely be called a

necessity for him and is distinctly a simple addition to his

comfort, and the city pays his tax. His neighbour has a family

and four children, and lives in three rooms which constitute

a very narrow, and hardly a sufficient lodging, but the rent

of it is five hundred francs and the unhappy man must pay: (1)

Six times greater taxes on what he consumes than his neighbour;

(2) A furniture tax; (3) Some portion of the tax that the city

pays on the apartment of the celibate neighbour. Evidently

the result is precisely the opposite of what it should be.”

(Bertillon, _La statistique humaine de la France_.)

[105] If a purse should be given by the state to one of every

seven children in the same family (according to a law at the

time of the Revolution which has recently been revived and

corrected) it would be no more than justice, nay, it would be

almost an act of simple reparation; although it must not be

supposed that the practical results would be considerable.

The benefit that it would do to the father of the family is

too uncertain, and the prospect of such an advantage could

influence only a man who had six children and was hesitating

about the seventh; but he who has had six children is not a

follower of Malthus and is not likely to be.

[Sidenote: 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]

[106] Suppose, to take almost the first figures that occur to

one, that the law taxed an only son’s inheritance twenty per

cent.; it might tax an inheritance to be handed down to two

children only fifteen per cent., an inheritance to be handed

down to three children ten per cent., to four children eight

per cent., to five children six per cent., to six children

four per cent., to seven children two per cent., and to any

greater number of children nothing. Remark that this gradation

actually exists to-day but inversely, because just in so far

as an inheritance has to be divided up among a large number

of children, the expenses of the sale and partition tend to

increase and the value of the property, which is thus split up

into bits, tends to decrease. A number of cases may be cited in

which inheritances that had to be divided among seven or eight

children have lost, by partition, not only twenty but even

twenty-five or fifty per cent. of their value. On the contrary,

an inheritance transmitted to a single inheritor is burdened

with the direct tax only, and that amounts at most to ten per

cent. Here, as elsewhere, the law protects small families and

encourages sterility.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[107] M. Javal in 1885 proposed, in the Chamber, to substitute

for Article 19 of the commission another article, according

to the terms of which when two or three sons of the same

family were enrolled they should be held to only three years

of service all told, and that when there were more than three

brothers enrolled they should each be required to give but

one year’s service. The amendment was due to the fact that

population in France is not increasing.

[108] Young soldiers also, as M. Richet says, might be

permitted to marry under certain conditions. They are precisely

at the age when fertility is at its greatest.

[Sidenote: Emigration to be encouraged.]

Emigration tends to augment fertility; emigration must therefore

be favoured by law. It is soberly estimated at present that from

thirty to forty thousand Frenchmen emigrate each year; the figure is

relatively small, but that number of emigrants a year is enough to

settle important colonies.[109] It is unscientific to maintain at this

late day that the French are incapable of colonizing when they have

so powerfully aided in forming the great English colonies in Canada,

India, and Egypt and are actually colonizing Algeria and Tunis. What

we lack is not the ability to establish colonies, but the habit of

emigration. Emigration, in spite of its importance for us, obtains

mainly in certain poor districts in France; it is not general enough

to have any considerable influence, as yet, in raising the birth-rate;

the law should here be looked to, to correct the habits of the people.

In England out of every family of four sons it is almost to be expected

that one of them will go to India, another to Australia, a third to

America; there is nothing surprising in it, it is the custom. A sense

of distance is almost unknown on the opposite side of the Channel. In

France, if a single child leaves the country, even as the secretary

of an embassy, he is as solemnly bid good-bye as if he were going

never to return, as if he were dying even. There is a great deal of

prejudice and ignorance in paternal anguish of this kind. Such and such

a sedentary profession, for example that of a physician, is subject

to perils that are perfectly well known to statisticians and which

we nevertheless do not hesitate to choose for our children precisely

because it permits them to live next door to us, rather than at the

other end of the world. Such national prejudices will give way before

education, the increasing habit of travelling, and the progressively

rapid circulation of society; laws might favour it. The spirit of

enterprise and colonization, which seems at first sight so foreign to

love of family, is capable of being allied with it; nay, becomes, under

certain circumstances, the very condition of it. To rear a numerous

family is always in a certain sense to colonize, even though all the

children live within the limits of their native country. To rear a

large family is to launch one’s children upon unknown ways, and demands

the activity of mind and fertility of resource which are of the essence

of colonization. The creation of a numerous family is positively a

social enterprise, as the creation of a great commercial house or a

great farming industry is an economical enterprise; success in both

cases demands constant effort and brings a various profit in return.

Suppose a couple have reared ten children to labour and honesty; the

children form a protecting phalanx about the parents and give them,

in return for the rearing, if not gross and direct benefits, at least

happiness and honour. We do not wish to disguise the fact, however,

that to rear a family involves a certain amount of risk; but every

enterprise involves a risk. And indeed the prime need in this whole

matter is to develop the spirit of enterprise and audacity which was

formerly so powerful in the French nation. A great many people to-day

remain celibate for the same reason that they are content to live

within a small income without endeavouring to increase their fortune

by investing it in commerce or manufacture; they are afraid of the

risks of the family, just as they are afraid of commercial risks. They

consume instead of producing, because producing is inseparable from a

certain preliminary investment of money and activity. Similarly a great

many people, once they are married, endeavour, so to speak, to reduce

marriage to a minimum; they do not dare to have children; they are

afraid of the preliminary outlay, they are afraid of emerging from the

shell of their short-sighted egoism.

[109] Rightly to appreciate the ability of France to maintain

colonies, this figure must not be compared with the rate of

emigration from other countries, but with the average excess of

births over deaths in France. Thus considered, the number of

forty thousand emigrants (adopted by M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu)

becomes relatively large, since the annual excess of our births

is not one hundred thousand.

[Sidenote: To French colonies.]

It is, of course, emigration to French colonies that the law ought

especially to favour, and for that purpose there is one respect in

which the military law should be reformed. As a matter of fact, in

spite of the law of July 27, 1872, the government is obliged to grant

pardon to the numerous Basques and Savoyards who emigrate to escape

military service. More than that, the sole important current that

exists in France flows toward foreign colonies, and often creates on

their shores industries which rival our own, while they rarely open

advantageous markets for our commerce. Is it not a matter of urgent

necessity to make our colonies as attractive to the French emigrants

as the colonies of any foreign nationality? If the young man of

twenty who has made up his mind to pass some years of his life in

Brazil finds himself _de facto_ exempt from military service, ought

he not to be _de jure_ exempt if he wishes to emigrate to Algiers,

to Tunis, to Tonquin, to Madagascar? Emigration is itself a sort of

military service. Colonists defend and enlarge the frontiers of the

countries; a really rational law should recognize them as a portion

of the military power of the country. Fifty-four chambers of commerce

in our principal cities, “considering that it is of the greatest

importance to encourage, by every means possible, intelligent and

well-educated young people, intending to emigrate, to establish

themselves in our colonies,” demanded justly “that, in times of peace,

young men residing in the colonies should be granted a delay of five

years in the call to military service, a delay which should become a

definitive exemption after a further residence of five consecutive

years.” We believe that this period of ten years might be shortened,

and that a residence of seven years in the colonies, or even of five

in certain distant colonies, like Tonquin, might be infinitely more

profitable to the mother country than a three-years’ military service

at home.[110] We are much less in need of soldiers to guard our

colonies than of colonists; indeed our colonies are too often “colonies

without colonists.” More than that, we travel too little, we are not

as well acquainted as we should be with our own possessions; whoever

had spent five of the most active years of his life in the colonies

would be tempted to return there or to send his friends and relatives

there. An amendment, looking to this exemption from military service,

was discussed in the Chamber of Deputies in May and June, 1884. If it

should ever be passed, it might have a considerable influence upon the

destinies of the French people.[111]

[110] The legal minimum of required residence should not be

taken as representing the real duration of actual residence:

people do not come back from distant countries merely for the

wishing; but the legislature should take advantage of the

psychological effect of a definite figure; an emigrant rarely

leaves France without a determination to be gone only so long.

The majority of the Basques who emigrate in such large numbers

to America expect to return soon; three-fourths of them become

good citizens of the Argentine Republic.

[111] Among the secondary causes which tend to lower the

French birth-rate, and which the law might counteract, let

us notice that of abortion, which is practised in France not

less commonly than in Germany, but bears much worse results

here than there, because of the small number of children that

are born in France. Paris positively enjoys a reputation for

the art of miscarriage, and ladies come there from various

parts of the world to be relieved of their children. “One of

the professors of our schools said this year, in one of his

courses, that a midwife had confessed to him that she produced

on an average one hundred miscarriages a year.” (Dr. Verrier,

_Revue scientifique_, June 21, 1884.) Pajot affirms that there

are more miscarriages than births. Might not this state of

things be remedied: 1. By the re-establishment of the revolving

boxes (_tours_); 2. By a more constant inspection of the books

and offices of midwives and accoucheurs, such as furnished

lodgings in Paris are subject to.

Among the principal reasons which prevent marriage let us

mention the preliminary formalities, which are too numerous

even when both parties are French, and are simply numberless

when one party is a foreigner. The law of marriages when

both parties are French ought to be simplified to the utmost

possible extent, so that an impatience of the preliminaries

could in nowise influence engaged couples. More than that

every effort should be made to facilitate marriages between

French subjects and foreigners, unions the results of which are

generally good for the race and which are hindered by all sorts

of legal obstacles in certain countries; this last question is

a subject to be dealt with by diplomacy. Still other causes

that the law might modify operate in France, if not to diminish

the birth-rate, at least—what amounts to the same thing—to

increase the mortality among children. In the first place is to

be reckoned the employment of wet-nurses, who should be subject

to a much more rigorous surveillance than they are at present,

under the Roussel law. In the second place, there is the

deplorable condition of illegitimate children, the mortality

among whom is greater in France than in any other country:

some of them are reported as stillborn, who medical statistics

would go to show are the victims of murder; others die of

hunger in the second week of their birth owing to negligence or

cruelty on the part of the mother. The re-establishment of the

revolving boxes (_tours_) would here also be of prime service.

In the third place, let us mention the exceptional mortality in

France of adults from twenty to twenty-five years of age, which

must result from bad administration in the army. Legislators

and administrators should direct their attention simultaneously

to all these points, if they are to check the current of

depopulation in France.

[Sidenote: Dangers of depopulation should be taught.]

III. Apart from the laws, the great means of influencing races is

public education: it is by that means that the ideas and feelings may

be moulded. The French people must be enlightened, therefore, on the

disastrous consequences of depopulation; sentiments of patriotism,

of honour, of duty, must in every possible way be appealed to. The

schoolmaster, the physician, and the mayor may all be of help. There

are a whole multitude of such means of instruction that are being

neglected.

[Sidenote: In the army by conferences.]

In the first place there are military conferences. Conferences of a

half hour each, with striking facts and examples and a few significant

figures, might exercise a considerable influence on the army, which

is to-day the nation. Military conferences will some day certainly be

one of the great means for the dissemination of knowledge; they have

recently been employed with success in Belgium during the strikes, to

inculcate notions of political economy in the army and to fortify the

military against certain communistic arguments.

[Sidenote: In the country by proclamations.]

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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[112] We conceive, for example, that a father who proposes

to enrich his son might often do well to take as the measure

of his generosity the sum that his son can lay by, and does

really lay by, during a year of labour. The father might double

or even sextuple that sum, but he ought at least to make it

the basis of his calculations instead of taking counsel with

some vague and often deceptive notion of equality, or with his

affection for his child, which is often an extreme instance

of inequality. We know a young man who at his twenty-eighth

year had already amassed by ten years of labour forty thousand

francs; his parents tripled the amount.

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[113] See _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_,

p. 53, and _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, 2e partie.

Part Third.

NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

CHAPTER I.

RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.

I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification

of the great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is

the appearance of a new religion to be expected?—Future

miracles impossible—Religious poetry not to be

expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely and naïvely

labouring in the creating of a new religion not to

be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original

stock of religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last

attempts at a new cult in America and in France—The

Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can socialism renew

religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic

experiments.

II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for

faith—1. Will the absence of religion result in

scepticism? Will the number of sceptics increase with the

disappearance of religion? 2. Substitution of doubt for

faith—Genuinely religious character of doubt.

III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for

dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and

instinct for metaphysics—Imperishable character of

the latter—Sentiment at once of the limits of science

and of the infinity of our ideal—Spencer’s attempted

reconciliation of science and religion—Confusion of

religion with metaphysics.

_I. Is a renovation of religion possible?_

[Sidenote: Is contemporary scepticism final?]

We have seen that the influence of dogma and of religious morality is

on the wane in actually existing societies; but will not this period of

decline be followed by a reaction in the opposite direction?

[Sidenote: Consolidation of existing religions not possible.]

Such a reaction could take place in two ways only: 1. By the

unification of religions; 2. By the appearance of a new religion.

The unification of existing religions is not to-day to be thought

of; each of them has shown itself to be incapable of assimilating

the others. The different Christian confessions hold each other in

mutual respect, but they do the same with the great religions of the

East. Islamism alone has made notable progress among tribes still

imbued with primitive animism, and for them it represents a manifest

progress. As for Christian missionaries they have never been able

to make many proselytes among the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, or

the Hindus. The Hindu who has been instructed in European science

necessarily comes to doubt the revealed foundation of his national

religion, but he is not on that account any the more inclined to

believe in the Christian revelation. He ceases simply to be religious

and becomes a free-thinker. All peoples alike are in that position;

the principal great religions possess an approximate value as symbols

of the unknowable, and worshippers perceive no advance in passing from

one of them to the other: mankind in general does not welcome change

for change’s sake. Missionaries themselves to-day lack faith in their

religion; they possess either enthusiasm minus talent or talent minus

enthusiasm, and the time is at hand when the spirit of propagandism,

which has hitherto constituted the power of religion, will abandon

it. Few people can cry to-day in the words of the unbelieving Jesuit

missionary: “Ah, you have no conception of the pleasure of convincing

men of what you do not believe yourself!” Where absolute faith is

lacking, and absolute faith in the very details of the dogmas is

lacking, sincerity, which constitutes the essential power of all

propagandism, is lacking too. Bishop Colenso was one day asked, by his

neophytes in Natal, some questions on the Old Testament. After having

followed him up from question to question they asked him, on his word

of honour, if all that was true. Seized by a scruple, the Bishop fell

into a profound train of reflection, studied the question, read Strauss

and the German commentators, and finally published a book in which

he treats Biblical history as a series of myths. To this celebrated

example of Colenso among the Kaffirs, must be joined that of Mr.

Francis Newman in Syria, and of the Rev. Adams in India, and of others

less well known. Efficiently to combat religions as well organized

as those of India, for example, our missionaries would be obliged to

become seriously proficient in the history of religion. But the day

they sincerely study comparative religion in the hopes of converting

somebody else, they will themselves undergo conversion, or at least

will rapidly learn to reject a belief in a special revelation.[114]

The great religions, and principally the “universal” religions, which

to-day have attained their full development, hold each other in

check. These vast bodies show almost no signs of life except within,

by the formation of new centres of activity which detach themselves

from the primitive nucleus, as we see daily happening in the bosom of

Protestantism, which is constantly being subdivided into new sects; as

also within the bosom of Hinduism, insomuch that the only sign of life

that these religions give is that they are beginning to disintegrate.

[114] See M. Goblet d’Alviella, _L’évolution religieuse_.

Anglo-Saxon religious proselytism has achieved the distinction

of contradicting and paralyzing itself. The Theosophist

Society of the United States, in 1879, sent to India certain

missionaries, or rather counter-missionaries, who were

commissioned “to preach the majesty and glory of all ancient

religions and to fortify the Hindu, the Cingalese, the Parsee,

against all efforts to induce him to accept a new faith instead

of the Vedas, of the Tri-Pitâka and of the Zend Avestâ.” In

India and in the island of Ceylon these counter-missionaries

have succeeded in bringing back to the primitive faith some

thousands of converts to Christianity.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Analogy between nineteenth century and times of the

Antonines superficial.]

The increasing multiplicity of sects, for example of the Protestant

sects; the courageous efforts of certain disciples of Comte and of

Spencer, the birth of Mormonism in America and of Brahmaism in India,

have been regarded as symptoms of a religious fermentation analogous

to that which disturbed the world at the time of the Antonines and

very possibly destined, like that, to result in a renovation. “All

things in nature spring from humble beginnings, and no one can to-day

say whether the unconscious mission of the fisherman and publicans,

gathered eighteen centuries ago on the borders of Lake Tiberias about

a gentle and mystical idealist, will not to-morrow be handed on to

such and such an association of spiritualists prophesying in a gorge

of the Rocky Mountains; to such and such an illuminated gathering

of socialists in some back shop in London; to such and such a band

of ascetics, meditating, like the Essenes of old on the miseries of

the world, in some jungle of Hindustan. Perhaps all they need is to

discover on the road to Damascus another Paul, to give them a passport

to future ages.”[115] These analogies between our century and that of

the Antonines are very superficial; between the century which, as a

whole, is of an unexampled incredulity and the century which was of an

unexampled credulity—which accepted all religion from that of Isis

and Mithra to that of Christ; from that of the talking serpent to that

of Christ incarnate in the body of a virgin. During the past eighteen

hundred years a new thing has been born into the world—science; and

science is not compatible with supernatural revelations, which are the

foundation of religions.

[115] _L’évolution religieuse contemporaine_, by M. Goblet

d’Alviella, p. 411.

[Sidenote: Attempt to found a religion to-day on miracles desperate.]

Will it be objected that miracles still happen? Possibly one or two

notable ones in a century! The surprising thing is not that miracles

still happen, but that, with millions of believers, including in their

ranks thousands of excited women and children, they do not happen

frequently. Every day ought to bring forth its duly authenticated

miracle, but unhappily daily miracles no longer happen—except in

mad-houses and hospitals for the hysterical, where they are observed

and reported nowadays by incredulous men of science. When they happen

elsewhere, true believers themselves are almost afraid of them and

do not care to talk about them. Of old a king forbade God to perform

miracles; the Pope has done almost as much to-day; they are regarded

as objects of doubt and suspicion, rather than of edification. Among

orthodox Protestant nations, miracles do not happen; enlightened

theologians among them no longer insist on the marvellous elements

in the early Christian tradition; they regard them as more likely to

enfeeble than to confirm the authority of the Scriptures. Add that as

a means of founding a new religion, or of reviving old religions, a

miracle or two would do no good; they would rather result in the total

destruction of the faith they were intended to establish. A whole

series of miracles would be necessary, a sort of marvellous atmosphere

in which the whole face of nature should be transformed, a mystic halo

not only visibly resting on the head of the prophet, but reflected

on the believers who surround him. In other words, the Messiah must

be in his lifetime quite as wonderful as he is always reported to

be afterward, and that without deception or finesse, either on his

part or on the part of those who surround him and are supported by

his divinity. Unhappily, in our days great men are immediately taken

account of by history, which verifies everything, describes everything,

sets down in plain print the contemporary fact, otherwise so likely

to settle, with time, into some fantastic shape. Even the legend of

Napoleon, which he himself laboured with all the resources of despotic

power and brutal force to establish, did not last thirty years in

Europe; in the East it exists still, transfigured. Personalities

shrink beneath the touch of history. If Jesus had lived to-day his

letters would have been published, and it is impossible to believe in

the divinity of anybody after one has read his correspondence. The

slightest facts of an interesting man’s life are ascertainable: state

records enable us to ascertain important dates, what he did from year

to year and even sometimes from day to day; sometimes a mere appearance

in court, such as happened in the life of Shakspeare’s father, may

serve to fix a date; and in the life of a prophet there would be

no lack of appearances in court since unlicensed assemblies are

interdicted. Life to-day is so hemmed in by reality, so disciplined,

that it is difficult for the marvellous to find entrance, or to make

good its lodgment even if it should get in. We live in little numbered

and windowed boxes, in which the least disturbance attracts attention;

we are watched like soldiers living in barracks; we have every evening

to be present at the roll-call, with no possibility of dropping out of

the society of men, of returning into ourselves, of avoiding the big

eye of society. We are like bees living under a glass; the observer can

watch them at work, watch them constructing their hive, watch them

making their honey; and the sweetest of honey, even the honey with

which the ancients nourished the baby Jupiter, ceases to be marvellous

when one has been present at its tardy and painstaking elaboration.

We are far from the time when Pascal could say “Miracles are as a flash

of lightning that reveals.” The lightning no longer flashes. Science

stands ready to explain the first miracle that arises in support of a

new religion.

[Sidenote: Genius has deserted the service of religion.]

Metaphysical and poetic genius also, upon which religions were so

dependent in their earliest stages in the past, have also withdrawn

from their service. Read the descriptions of the latest miracles, those

at Lourdes, for example: the little girl taking off her stockings to

step into the rivulet, the words of the Virgin, the vision repeated

as a spectacle before witnesses who saw nothing—all of it is trivial

and insignificant; how far we have travelled from the Lives of the

Saints, the Gospel, the great Hindu legends! The poor in spirit may see

God or the Virgin, but they cannot make others see them; the poor in

spirit cannot found or revive religion; it requires genius, and genius,

which bloweth where it listeth, bloweth to-day elsewhere. If the Bible

and the Gospels had not been sublime poems they would not have made

the conquest of the world. Æsthetically considered, they are epics

greater than the Iliad. What Odyssey equals that of Jesus? Refined

Greeks and Romans did not at first appreciate the simple, impassioned

poetry of the Gospels; it was long before they admired the style of

the Scriptures. St. Jerome, transported in a dream to the feet of the

Sovereign Judge, heard a menacing voice cry: “Thou art naught but a

Ciceronian!” After this dream St. Jerome applied himself to the study

of the beauties of the Bible and the New Testament, and came ultimately

to prefer them to the balanced periods of the great Latin orator: the

Sermon on the Mount, in spite of some inconsistencies (in part the work

of the disciples), is more eloquent than the most eloquent of Cicero’s

orations, and the invectives against the Pharisees, authentic or not,

are better literature than the denunciations against Catiline. M.

Havet, in our judgment, entirely misses the point, when he asks how

“so great a revolution could have taken its rise from such commonplace

literature as the New Testament.” The literary excellence of the New

Testament is of a new kind, unparalleled among the Greeks or the

writers of the Old Testament; it possesses the grace of tenderness

and of unction, which is well worth the lyrical fire of the prophets;

it is a profound and naïve manual of popular morality, and every word

makes one’s heart vibrate. The literary success of the New Testament

was fully merited. The Hebrew people, who had not produced one man

of science, had evidently produced a succession of sombre, tender,

puissant poets unparalleled among any other people; a fact which in a

great part explains the victorious progress of Hebrew religion. Poetry,

like hope, is the sister of faith, and is more necessary than hope to

faith, for one may forego the distant grace of hope when one is under

the present charm of an illusion.

[Sidenote: And the conditions in which alone genius could succeed are

wanting.]

To found a great religion has demanded and will always demand the

services of men of genius such as Jesus was, or, to be quite historic,

as St. Paul was. But if genius is to found religion it can do so

only under two essential conditions. It must in the first place be

absolutely sincere; we no longer live in a period when religion can be

benefited by imposture; it must, in the second place, distinctly impose

upon itself; it must be the dupe of its own inspiration, of its own

interior illuminations, disposed to see in them something superhuman,

to feel itself in direct communication with God, or at least especially

designated by God. This second condition was easy to realize in ancient

times when, in their ignorance of psychological and physiological

phenomena, not only men like Jesus but philosophers like Socrates and

Plotinus believed that they felt within them something supernatural,

took their visions and their ecstasies seriously; and, unable to

explain their own very genuine genius, regarded it as a proof of some

mysterious or miraculous communication with God. Purely and simply to

rank these great men among lunatics would be absurd; they were simply

seeking to explain phenomena which overtaxed their knowledge and gave

what, after all, was the most plausible explanation for the times

in which they lived. With the scientific knowledge that we possess

nowadays, and which every man who attains a certain intellectual

level inevitably will possess, men like Moses and Jesus, men who

are inspired, will be obliged, so to speak, to choose between two

alternatives; to see in their inspiration simply the natural impulse of

genius, to speak in their own name, to make no pretences to revelation

or prophecy, to be, in effect, philosophers, or actively to allow

themselves to be deceived by their own exaltation, to objectify it, to

personify it, to become madmen in downright earnest. At the present

day those who are not capable of naming the force that is acting in

them and declaring it to be natural and human, and of preserving their

self-mastery, are definitively regarded as of unsound mind; prophets

who believe in their own prophecies are sent to Charenton. We are

familiar with distinctions that were unknown in ancient times, even to

the promoters of religious ideas; the great men who founded religions

were carried away by the movement they had themselves called into

being; were divinized by the God that they themselves had brought

to men. Genius is as capable of going to school as stupidity; and,

like stupidity, it has been to school in the nineteenth century and

is familiar with nineteenth-century science. A time will come—nay,

probably has come for Europe—when prophets, apostles, and Messiahs

will be extinct among men. It is a species which is dying out. “Who

of us, who of us will become a god?” None of us will become a god,

and more than that none of us wants to. Science has killed the

supernatural in us even in the very centre of our being, in our deepest

ecstasies; visions no longer put on the shape of apparition but of

simple hallucination, and the day they become so strong that we believe

in them we lose all power to make anybody else believe in them, and

become, not uncommonly, amenable to the law. The middle term between

the man of genius and the fool, the man of inspiration, of revelation,

the Messiah, the God, has disappeared.

[Sidenote: Dissemination of knowledge has weakened the religious

sentiment.]

Add that inspiration nowadays, and forever more, lacks and will lack

its appropriate environment. Intensity of religious emotion in a

people, an intensity which sometimes rises to the height of fanaticism,

depends, in a great measure, upon ignorance and upon the level of

intelligence achieved by average human life. When problems of the

origin and destiny, and reason of things, are suddenly presented to an

ignorant people, it experiences profound terrors, ecstasies, a general

heightening of the sensibility which is due to the fact that a state of

metaphysical and philosophical curiosity is utterly unfamiliar to it,

constitutes a positive revolution in its ordinary habits of mind. When

the average level of intellectual activity is once raised, metaphysical

emotion loses its revolutionary character precisely because the whole

extent of human existence has become imbued with it. A calm, high,

continuous enjoyment takes the place of a brief, stormy ecstasy; people

who pass their lives on the shore of the ocean cease to fear it, or

at least do not experience so violent an emotion in its presence as

they did at the sight of their first tempest. If we had never looked

upon the starry heavens, the first time we lifted our eyes to them we

should be filled with fear; the spectacle of them to-day calms us,

gently inspires us. To appease the violence of religious sentiment, it

must, when it has been purified, be permitted to permeate the whole of

human existence, be always present with us, and domesticate us in the

infinite.

[Sidenote: A new religion must be both novel and significant.]

A final condition precedent to the success of a new religion would be

that it should be really new, that it should contribute a new idea to

the treasury of the human mind. Among the wretched attempts at starting

a new faith which have been made from one end of the world to the other

in our days, nothing original has made its appearance. In America a

religion new in appearance, Mormonism, has had some success; it is,

of all modern attempts, the only one which has relied upon miraculous

prophecy and revelation, such as are indispensable to a genuine

dogmatic religion: it has also its book, its Bible, and even includes

in its legend some prosaic tale of marvellous pair of spectacles

destined for the deciphering of the book. The God of Mormonism, who

is rather better educated than the God of the Bible, possesses some

notion of optics. But at bottom Mormonism is simply a modern edition of

Jewish ideas and customs: the whole religion is a bit of plagiarism,

a resuscitation of superanuated legends and beliefs, to which it has

added nothing but what is trivial; it is a religious anachronism. It

seems also to have reached the limit of its development, the number

of its adherents is not increasing. Hindu Brahmaism is an eclectic

and mystic spiritualism without one really new idea. Comtism, which

consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt

to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul. The

spiritualists are charlatans, or empirics, who have been impressed with

certain, as yet obscure, phenomena of the nervous system which they

themselves are unable to explain scientifically. But charlatanism has

never founded anything durable in the domain of religion. To compare

American Mormonism or spiritualism to nascent Christianity is to make

one’s self ridiculous. Humble as the beginnings of Christianity were

one must not be the dupe of historical illusion, nor believe that

Christianity owed its triumph to a simple concurrence of happy events;

that the world, for example, according to M. Renan’s hypothesis, might

quite easily have become Mithraic. The disciples of a certain Chrestus,

mentioned for the first time by Suetonius, could present, as the basis

of their as yet vague beliefs, two incomparable epic poems, the Old

Testament and Gospels; they introduced into the world a new system

of morality, which was admirable even in its errors, and original at

least for the mass of mankind; and they contributed, finally, to the

common stock of ideas a great metaphysical conception, that of the

resurrection, which, combined with current philosophical conceptions,

necessarily gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.

Christianity conquered by its own weight, it was inevitable that it

should find its St. Paul; the Old Testament and the Gospels were too

eminent to be forgotten, or to remain without influence on human life.

There is not a single example in the history of the world of a great

masterpiece, at once literary or philosophical, which has gone its

way unperceived, without exerting an influence upon the progress of

humanity. Every work which is sufficiently endowed with beauty or

virtue is sure of the future.

[Sidenote: No great religion could nowadays take its rise among the

masses.]

It is among the masses that religious movements have hitherto begun.

But a new religion could not come to us to-day from the ignorant

masses of an Oriental people nor from the lower classes of any country

of Europe. In heathen antiquity, all social classes were united in a

belief in naïve superstitions. Marcus Aurelius himself was obliged

to preside in great pomp over a ceremony in honour of the serpent of

Alexander of Abonoteichos which numbered believers among his friends.

To-day a bishop in Australia can refuse to order a prayer for rain, and

declare that atmospheric phenomena are regulated by inflexible natural

laws, and persuade the believers in his diocese, if they want a remedy

against drought, to ameliorate their system of irrigation. These two

facts indicate the thorough-going difference between the ancient and

modern world. The contemptuous title of Barbarians, which the Greeks

and Romans applied to all other peoples, was less than exact, for the

Hebrews and the Hindus at least possessed a more profound religion

than the Greeks and Romans and even in certain respects a superior

literature. Greek and Roman civilization is a rare historical example,

which proves that religion is not necessarily the measure of the

intellectual development of a people. Greece excels principally by her

art and science; but the superiority which she conceived herself to

possess in other respects was a pure illusion founded on ignorance.

The superiority that we attribute to ourselves is demonstrated by

our knowledge; we are better acquainted to-day with the religion of

most Oriental peoples than they are themselves; and we have earned

a right to sit in judgment on them, and admire them, and criticise

them, that the ancients did not possess. The distinction between those

who know and those who do not is to-day the sole really serious line

of demarcation between classes and nations. And the line is one that

religion cannot pass, for every complete religion involves a general

conception of the world, and no such naïve conception of the world

as a man of the people is capable of can ever find acceptance by a

cultivated mind. No great religion can germinate and achieve complete

development in modern society.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving on existing religions in their

kind.]