Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/696

 the forester's business to find and remove. He would not think, however, of stopping the cutting of the old trees, for that would be to prevent the essential condition of the new growth's getting a headway. The law of all living societies, in forests and in nations, is the perpetual renewal of the stock.

—The evil must be fought in its causes. These causes are detestable family customs, dictated by pecuniary considerations. These being the things to be reformed, and money being the cause of them, the beginning should be made with money. We have a right to demand energetic measures, severe if necessary, against the evil that is eating France. Those which we shall ask for here are only equitable. They shall fully respect individual liberty, and in some cases augment it. Their purpose is to teach the French people who do not know it the immense wrong which their mistaken selfishness is inflicting upon the country. They aim especially to modify customs, and to invoke for reasonably numerous families the profound respect and protection that are due them. And they seek to harmonize general with particular interests, a thing to which the present laws have precisely the contrary effect.

It is just as much every man's duty to contribute to the perpetuity of his country as it is to defend it. This is a moral truth which the French have forgotten, and it will have to be inculcated in them. The case is beyond the reach of the most eloquent sermons, and will have to be met, if the mass of men are to be convinced, by palpable facts that will touch all personally. This leads to the principle, which seems, moreover, self-evident, that the fact of bringing up a child should be considered a form of tax payment. The payment of a tax is, in fact, the imposition of a pecuniary sacrifice for the profit of the whole nation. This is what the father accepts who rears a child.

A family, to be acquitted of the tax, should rear at least three children. It takes two children to fill the place of the parents, and there should be a third in addition, for one in three families, on an average, will have no children. Hence the family which, does not rear three children will fail of imposing sufficient sacrifices upon itself for the future of the nation. It is free to do this, but should pay damages for it. He, on the other hand, who rears more than three children imposes supplementary burdens upon himself, for which he should be recompensed every time occasion offers. The principle of a reduction of taxes proportioned to the number of children was applied in June, 1898, at the instance of the Alliance Nationale, by the city of Lyons. It has been adopted, very timidly at first, and then a little more broadly, by the