2 54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 mer- 

 chant; 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 capillarite so dale — this striving of each 

 social molecule to rise higher in the organism — is, he thinks, the prin- 

 cipal cause of the infecundity of the French race, at least during recent 

 years. 



III. Proposed Kemedies 



Such are the more important causes to which are attributed the de- 

 clining 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 com- 

 mission on depopulation, and it should be met by better sanitary meas- 

 ures, 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 de- 

 pendent upon the dairy for their nourishment. Furthermore, legisla- 

 tion should be enacted forbidding the employment of mothers in indus- 

 trial establishments at least six weeks before and after accoudiement, 

 and such establishments should be required to provide places at which 

 babies may be nourished by their mothers. 1 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 fam- 

 ilies. 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 



i Such a law has been enacted since the above waa written. 



