THE DEPOPULATION OF FRANCE. 675 



that the large families who resort to his dispensary nearly all have 

 a drunkard at their head. The families that issue from such 

 parents are not necessarily degenerate. This curious observation 

 ought not certainly to make us partisans of drunkenness, but it 

 demonstrates to us that the suppression of alcoholism is not what 

 will restore French natality. Rather the contrary. 



III. EXAMINATION or MEASURES PROPOSED FOR DIMINISHING MOR- 

 TALITY. As the question of the population of France has been more 

 especially discussed by the doctors, it has done great service as a 

 vaulting board for medical theories. Doctors are very ready to 

 reason as if they could dispose of human life at their will. It is 

 very hard to keep a man from dying. The most skillful doctors 

 have not reached that point; but it is very easy to have a man born, 

 and is within the reach of the latest-made young practitioner. It 

 is very doubtful whether the proposed measures will be efficacious 

 or practical. See how much trouble we have had, after a century 

 of experiments, in realizing the benefit of vaccination, the only 

 nearly infallible remedy we have against disease. Surely a coun- 

 try ought to guard itself as much as possible against sickness and 

 death, and should do everything that will conduce to that end, as 

 we do all that is possible to cure a man ill with pneumonia or any 

 other disease. But we should not delude ourselves with illusions, 

 and we have to confess that the efficacy of the measures which we 

 take to satisfy our conscience is very doubtful. The failures of 

 hygiene are almost as numerous as those of medicine. 



Mortality has not increased in France. It is rather less there 

 than in other countries in the same latitude, and even less than 

 that of some of the countries situated farther north. So we can 

 hardly hope to diminish it very much. 



The effect of mortality on the whole is, moreover, not to dimin- 

 ish natality, but rather to favor it. The death of an adult leaves 

 some position vacant, and makes room for the institution of a new 

 household and the birth of other children. So when a rich old man 

 dies, the money he leaves helps set up his children in life ; and when 

 a poor old man dies, a burden is taken away from his descendants, 

 who had to support him and who can now marry and have children. 

 Some of the parallelisms in the movements of population which 

 statisticians have observed may be explained thus. We might com- 

 pare a human society to a tank so arranged as to be always full 

 of water. It has a supply pipe (natality and immigration) which 

 opens and operates only when the discharge pipe (mortality and 

 emigration) is also open; or to a forest of definite extent, in which, 

 when a clearing is opened, a new growth appears in the cleared 

 space, unless some cause exists to prevent it, which cause it will be 



