Note 96 — Chapter VII · THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.

What economists have really established, and what MM. Maurice Block, Courcelles-Seneuil, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Othenin d’Haussonville are right in maintaining, is that it is harmful to society to add to the non-working classes, to the number of feeble beings who are incapable of labour, to the number of beggars, and of non-combatants generally, whoever they may be. Well, poverty favours the birth of those who are dependent upon society, and the birth of those who are dependent upon society tends still further to increase poverty; that is the circle from which so many economists have believed that the precepts of Malthus offered them an issue. Unhappily, if there is one universal attribute of poverty, it is its fertility; for in all nations the poorest classes are those that have the greatest number of children. Malthus has never been listened to by the poorer classes, but precisely by those only who, from the point of view of a sagacious political economy, ought to be encouraged to leave as many children behind them as possible, because they alone would educate them well: that is to say, the economical peasantry and the prosperous middle class. Insomuch that a fertility of the poor is absolutely without remedy (except by way of charity or emigration); but it constitutes in the end a much less considerable evil than the infertility of a nation as a whole, and is an ultimate evil only because, in the last analysis, it results in a genuine unproductivity. Poverty, especially in the cities, rapidly kills out the most prolific races.