M. L. March. Sociology and Eugenics.219
finally, the most productive classes, the workmen in large industries, like
mines and spinning mills(i).
Productiveness is not highest in small country parishes. It is higher in
the more important districts which are the seat of large industries. But it
decreases again in cities, and is lowest of all in Paris. This is a general
phenomenon in countries in which the birth-rate is beginning to decline, the
movement generally begins in the capital where commerce and the learned
professions are concentrated, in which the productiveness is very low.
Occupation, therefore, appears one of the most important of the economic
factors which determine fertility ; more important, perhaps, than the factor
“ concentration of population.”
Income does not appear to have exclusively, at least in France, that
influence which is attributed to it. We know for certain that workmen in
general have more children than employers, but certain classes of employers,
particularly the heads of large enterprises, have more children than many
classes of workmen, while employés have fewer children than workmen.
Nevertheless, among workmen, the lowest paid, whose work is most irregular
and among whom unemployment is most common, as for instance day
labourers and unskilled labourers, have more children than those belonging
to classes which are more highly paid and better insured against the risks
of life. The desire to rise has also been invoked as a cause of infertility ; this
Arsène Dumont has called “ social capillarity.” Here, again, a distinction
must be made. Progress towards a higher and higher level of well-being,
like everything else which exacts efforts to attain a definite end, can bring
about a general fall of the birth-rate; it is one of the ways in which the
influence of progressive civilisation is felt, but the examination of the
occupational categories forbids us to attribute to it a universal preponder
ance. The proletariat in large centres and the artisan or small farmer have
been contrasted, and it has been said that each class has the productiveness
of the class to which it wishes to belong ; but has the employe more hope
of rising from his class than the workman?—he rises from it, perhaps, less
often. To sum up in a word that which, amidst the complex play of
causes, appears to act in all occupations and in all conditions :—fertility
is perhaps less generally governed by the desire to rise than by the fear of
falling; and the fear is directly bound up with the fact that children
are a burden. This fact is what strikes every one more forcibly than
formerly, when they think of the growing mobility of existence, of the
changes in manners, institutions, and legislation, all of which may put a
heavy charge on the mass of the population.
(1) I have shown in a previous report that in France in the regions of large
agricultural holdings and large industries the birth-rate is highest, and has decreased
less than in regions where small concerns are the rule.
