and always will be, important to be able to prejudge how "the voice of the ancestors" may speak in the individual. But even from the crumbling of the family will result the reconstitution of a larger collective unit, having common interests and resuscitating under another form that solidarity without which no society can endure.
But this new collectivity will in no way be copied from the primitive clan. Whether it be called State, district, canton, or commune, its government will be at once despotic and liberal; it will repress everything that would be calculated to injure the community, but in everything else it will endeavour to leave the most complete independence to individuals. Our actual family circle is most often very imperfect; so few families can give, or know how to give, a healthy, physical, moral, and intellectual education to the child, that in this domain large encroachments of the State, whether small or great, are probable, even desirable. There is, in fact, a great social interest before which the pretended rights of families must be effaced. In order to prosper and live, it is necessary that the ethnic or social unit should incessantly produce a sufficient number of individuals well endowed in body, heart, and mind. Before this primordial need all prejudices must yield, all egoistic interests must bend.
But the family and marriage are closely connected; the former cannot be modified so long as the latter remains unchanged. If the legal ties of the family are stretched, while social ties are drawn closer, marriage will have the same fortune. For a long time, more or less silently, a slow work of disintegration has begun, and we see it accentuated every day. Leaving aside morals, which are difficult to appreciate, let us simply take the numerical results which statistics furnish us with in regard to divorce and illegitimate births.
In the five countries compared as follows, the increase of divorces has been continuous and progressive during thirty years, and in France the number has doubled.
The number of illegitimate births followed simultaneously an analogous progression. In France, during the period 1800-1805, it was 4.75 per 100; now, wrote M. Block in 1869, it has gradually risen to 7.25 per 100.[1] At the same
- ↑ M. Block, Europe politique et sociale, p. 204.
