Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/694

 case of need, the matter is settled by an irregular affiance, and natality loses little.

The violent suppression of convents has also been proposed as a measure for promoting the increase of marriages. A person who has reflected much could not speak of such a thing. To what extent does any one suppose that might augment natality? The convents at this time contain about sixty thousand women. Suppose they were all as ready as other women to marry—which is not the case, for the fact that they have retired to a cloister proves that family life has few attractions for them—a simple calculation shows that they would afford forty-five hundred births a year. So France needs six hundred thousand infants every year, and a plan is advanced to give it four or five thousand at most—and that by means of a violent measure, unworthy of an age of freedom!

Next are the measures proposed for diminishing involuntary sterility. Is involuntary sterility as frequent as it is supposed to be? Our respected master, Jules Rochard, was surprised to find two million sterile families recorded in the census reports. But the number does not appear excessive. We can not compare it with similar returns abroad, for France is the only country, except in the case of a few cities abroad, in which items of this kind are inquired into by the census takers. But, according to different gynæcologists—chiefly German—cited in the Academy of Medicine, the number of sterile families should be sixteen per cent. Now, this is the exact proportion found in France in the enumeration of 1896. The really surprising thing about the matter is not the number of sterile families, but the limited fecundity of the fertile families. There are other figures to show that absolute sterility is not the cause of the low rate of French natality. An inquiry respecting sterile families was made in 1856, at a time when French natality was a little higher than it is now, a comparison of the results of which with those of the enumeration of 1886 shows that the number of fruitful families had not diminished (83.6 per cent of the families having one or more children then, to 83.3 in 1886). The factor that has diminished is the fertility of the families. It is only necessary to cite the measures that have been suggested to counteract this supposed excessive sterility to make their inanity apparent. Among them are reform of the abuse of tobacco and alcohol and war upon syphilis. Do not these scourges exist among other nations than us? Nothing could be more salutary than to war upon them, but to connect their existence with the depopulation of France is a singular exaggeration of their importance. More than this, the physician of a benevolent institution in Paris has told me