II. Causes
A variety of causes, hygienic, social, economic and legal, have been offered in explanation of the conditions described above in respect to the state of the French population. First of all, an unnecessarily high rate of mortality among the French people is said to be partly responsible. For all France the number of deaths per 1,000 of population is in the neighborhood of 20, whereas in England, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Switzerland it is considerably lower, the rate being as low as 14 in Norway and 17 in Sweden. Infantile mortality is especially high in France, one third of all deaths occurring before the end of the third year. The ravages of tuberculosis among the French also contribute greatly to the elevation of the death rate. M. Bourgeois recently stated before the Congress of Social Hygiene that although the death-rate from tuberculosis had fallen in England and Germany from 11 per 10,000 of the population, the rate in France was 22.5. The rate of mortality on account of this disease is especially high in Paris, where in 1908 there were 13,600 deaths therefrom.
Alcoholism was declared by the Klotz commission to be partly responsible for the high infantile mortality and to some extent also for the small birth-rate. The commission produced statistics to show that in those departments where there has been a large increase in the consumption of alcohol, there has been a corresponding increase in the rate of infantile mortality. Senator Ribot declares that alcoholism and tuberculosis are fast obliterating the French race and this opinion is supported by the testimony of a number of noted specialists in alcoholic diseases. Statistics show that there has been an enormous increase in the amount of alcohol consumed in France (the average per capita consumption is about fourteen litres per year and in certain cities of Normandy it is as high as twenty-nine) and they also show that a large percentage of the inmates of the hospitals and insane asylums are alcoholics. But as M. Bertillon has declared, while alcoholism is undoubtedly exerting a terrible effect upon the quality of the young and is contributing to race degeneracy, it is not an immediate cause of sterility and does not necessarily affect the number of births. Moreover, there are other nations where the evil of alcoholism is equally great, for example, England, Germany and Belgium, and yet those countries have a relatively high birth-rate.
The decline of religious faith and of traditional beliefs among the French is regarded by many persons, among whom may be mentioned the distinguished economist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, as one of the contributory causes for the small birth-rate. The scriptural injunction to multiply and replenish the earth no longer has the moral influence upon the French mind which it once had. The obligation to rear families which has always been regarded as a religious duty naturally rests
