Note 106 — Chapter VII · THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.

Suppose, to take almost the first figures that occur to one, that the law taxed an only son’s inheritance twenty per cent.; it might tax an inheritance to be handed down to two children only fifteen per cent., an inheritance to be handed down to three children ten per cent., to four children eight per cent., to five children six per cent., to six children four per cent., to seven children two per cent., and to any greater number of children nothing. Remark that this gradation actually exists to-day but inversely, because just in so far as an inheritance has to be divided up among a large number of children, the expenses of the sale and partition tend to increase and the value of the property, which is thus split up into bits, tends to decrease. A number of cases may be cited in which inheritances that had to be divided among seven or eight children have lost, by partition, not only twenty but even twenty-five or fifty per cent. of their value. On the contrary, an inheritance transmitted to a single inheritor is burdened with the direct tax only, and that amounts at most to ten per cent. Here, as elsewhere, the law protects small families and encourages sterility.