The Modern Regime, vol 2 | Page 4

but the ideas of which
were long settled in his mind - M. Taine would have first described this
legislation and defined its principles and general characteristics. He
meant to show it more and more systematic, deliberately hostile to
collective enterprise, considering secondary bodies not as "distinct,
special organs," endowed with a life of their own, "maintained and
stimulated by private initiation," but as agents of the State "which
fashions them after a common pattern, imposes on them their form and
prescribes their work." - This done, this defect pointed out, the author
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