Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/258

254 burden and which desires that the family from one generation to another shall rise in the social scale. Every parent desires that his children shall occupy a higher social position than he himself did. The laborer's ambition is to see his son a landlord or a functionary; the peasant wants his son to be a monsieur, an advocate, a doctor or a merchant; and the petit bourgeois has similar ambitions. The only means of realizing such ambitions is to limit the number of children to whom the fortune is to be left. This capillarité sociale—this striving of each social molecule to rise higher in the organism—is, he thinks, the principal cause of the infecundity of the French race, at least during recent years.

Such are the more important causes to which are attributed the declining population of France. Turning now to a consideration of the proposed remedies, we find that they are as various as the causes and are hygienic, legislative, administrative, fiscal and social in character. First of all, the death-rate, especially among infants, may, and should be, reduced to the level attained in other countries of Europe. More than one sixth of the children born in France, or between 150,000 and 170,000, die every year, and of these one third die during the first month after birth. This is a "veritable disaster" to the nation, says the commission on depopulation, and it should be met by better sanitary measures, medical surveillance, more effective inspection of the milk supply and gratuitous assistance to the poor. Maternal nourishment should be encouraged by every means, in default of which measures should be taken to assure a supply of sterilized milk to children who are dependent upon the dairy for their nourishment. Furthermore, legislation should be enacted forbidding the employment of mothers in industrial establishments at least six weeks before and after accouchement, and such establishments should be required to provide places at which babies may be nourished by their mothers. By such measures as these at least 50,000 children, it is claimed, could be saved for the nation every year.

State aid and initiative in the construction of cheap tenement houses for large families, in the cities where rents are high and the cost of living excessive, has been advocated by many social reformers. Last year the parliament adopted a building code governing the erection of such houses, and it contained special provisions in favor of large families. During the past year a law was also passed providing for public assistance for large families and making the expense of such assistance obligatory upon the departments, but providing also that the state and the communes should share a portion of the cost. The law enacts that every head of a family having more than three legitimate children and