heart, now deprived
of its food by the lack of invisible posterity, fall back on affection
for visible progeny?[5103] In a country where there are few
openings, where careers are overcrowded, what are the effects of this
paid idolatry[5104], 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 the state
of that society." It was his aim to seek out in the novel, in poetry, in
the arts since 1820, that is to say in all works that throw light on the
various and successive kinds of the reigning ideal--in philosophy, in
religion, in industry, in all branches of French action and thought--the
signs of the psychological tendencies of modern Frenchman in this or
that social condition. What would this book have been? M. Taine had
sketched it out so far back, he had abandoned it for so long a time and
never alluded to it, that nothing remains by which we can form any
idea of it. But, in this undertaking demanding so much science, so much
intuition, so much experience of accurate observation, of general views
and precise generalization--in this vast study requiring such profound
knowledge, not alone of France but of societies offering points of
comparison with her, we may be certain that the author of Notes
sur Paris, Notes sur l'Angleterre, of the Ancien