- rate. We invariably see the number of marriages and
births increasing after a series of prosperous years, and vice versâ. General causes have naturally a greater influence on the population living from hand to mouth. The well-to-do classes escape this, and we even find that the chances of marriage for the rich increase during years of high prices.[1]
We can scarcely attribute to anything else but an excessive care for money and a forethought pushed to timidity some very disquieting traits in our marriage and birth rates in France. I will merely recall, by the way, the continually decreasing excess of our births, which, if not stopped by radical social reforms, can only end in our final decay.
The fear of marriage and the family is the particular feature of French matrimoniality. The desirable age for marriage, says A. Bertillon,[2] is from twenty-two to twenty-five for men, and from nineteen to twenty for women. In England more than half the marriages for men (504 in 1000) and nearly two-thirds of those of women are contracted before the age of twenty-five. Now, this is only the case in France for 0.29, and in Belgium for 0.20 of the marriages. A demographical phenomenon of the same kind is observed in Italy, where only 232 men out of 1000 marry before the age of twenty-five.[3] At Paris, where the struggle for existence is more severe, and where the care for money is more predominant, late marriages abound, and it is only above the age of forty for men and thirty-five for women that the marriage rate equals, and even exceeds, that of the whole of France;[4] it is self-evident that the result of this must be a decrease in the total of births by marriage. Whether these facts proceed from the growing difficulties of existence, or from a fear, always augmenting also, of trouble and care, or from these two causes combined and mutually strengthening each other, the consequence is the same: marriages are becoming more and more simple commercial transactions, from whence arises the worst and most shameful of selections—selection by money. As a moral demographer, A. Bertillon thunders against what he calls "the system of dower" more
