'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 exist which render the
social activity of men possible or impossible. And, especially, "in a
given society, there is always a psychological state which provokes