The Modern Regime, vol 2 | Page 4

was to enumerate the consequences flowing from it, the social body entirely changed, "not only in its proportions but in its innermost texture," every tendency weakened by which individuals form groups that are to last longer than themselves, each man reduced to his own self, the egoistic instinct enhanced while the social instinct wastes away for want of nourishment, his daily imagination solely concerned with life-long aims, incapacitated for politics as he is "lacking spheres of action in which he may train himself according to his experiences and faculties", his mind weakening in idleness and boredom or in a thirst for pleasure and personal success, - in short, an organic impoverishment of all faculties of cohesion, leading to the destruction of the natural centers of grouping and, consequently, to political instability.[2]
One association of special import remains, the most spontaneous, the deepest rooted, so old that all others derive from it, so essential that in any attack upon it we see even the substance of the social body decaying and diminishing. On the nature of the Family; on its profound physiological origins; on its necessary role in the prolongation and "perpetuation of the individual" by affording him "the sole remedy for death"; on its primitive constitution among men of our own race; on its historic organization and development "around the family home"; on the necessity of its subsistence and continuance in order to insure the duration of this home; on its other needs, M. Taine, with his knowledge of man and of his history, had given a good deal of thought to fundamental ideas analogous to those which he has consecrated to the classic spirit, to the origin of honor and conscience, to the essence of local society, so many stones, as it were, shaped by him from time to time and deeply implanted as the foundations of his criticism of institutions. Having set forth the proper character and permanent wants of the Family he was able to study the legislation affecting it, and, first, "the Jacobin laws on marriage, divorce, paternal authority and on the compulsory public education of children; next, the Napoleonic laws, those which still govern us, the Civil Code" with that portion of it in which the equality and leveling spirit is preserved, along with "its tendency to regard property as a means of enjoyment" instead of the starting-point and support of "an enduring institution." - Having exposed the system, M. Taine meant to consider its effects, those of surrounding institutions, and to describe the French family as it now exists. He had first studied the "tendency to marriage"; he had considered the motives which, in general, weaken or fortify it, and appreciated those now absent and now active in France. According to him, "the healthy ideal of every young man is to found a family, a house of infinite duration, to create and to rule." Why in modern France does he give his thoughts to "pleasure and of excelling in his career"? Why does he regard marriage "without enthusiasm, as a last measure, as a 'settling-down,' and not as a beginning, the commencement of a veritable career, subordinating all others to it and regarding these, pecuniary and professional, as auxiliary and as means?" - After the tendency to marriage, "the tendency to paternity." How does the shrunken family come to live only for itself? In what way, in default of other interests, - homestead, domain, workshop, lasting local undertakings, - how does the heart, now deprived of its food by the lack of invisible posterity, fall back on affection for visible progeny?[3] In a country where there are few openings, where careers are overcrowded, what are the effects of this paididolatry[4], and, to sum up in one phrase, in what way does the French system of to-day tend to develop the most fatal of results, the decline in the birth rate?
Here the study of institutions on a grand scale terminated. Formerly, M. Taine had contemplated a completion of his labors by a description of contemporary France, the product of origins scrutinized by him and of which he had traced the formation. Having disengaged his factors he meant to combine them, to show them united and acting in concert, all centering on the great actual facts which dominate the rest and which determine the order and structure of modern society. As he had given a picture of old France he aimed to portray France as it now is, with its various groups, - village, small town and large city, - with its categories of men, peasants, workmen, bourgeois, functionaries and capitalists; with the forces that impel each class along, their passions, their ideas, their desires. Besides the numerical statistics of person he meant to have set forth the moral statistics of souls. According to him, psychological conditions