Big tears welled into La Moineaude’s eyes.  And Mathieu, who had listened with passionate interest, felt quite upset.  Ah! that wretched toil-doomed flesh that hastened to offer itself without waiting until it was even ripe for work!  Ah! the laborer who is prepared to lie, whom hunger sets against the very law designed for his own protection!

When La Moineaude had gone off in despair the doctor continued speaking of juvenile and female labor.  As soon as a woman first finds herself a mother she can no longer continue toiling at a factory.  Her lying-in and the nursing of her babe force her to remain at home, or else grievous infirmities may ensue for her and her offspring.  As for the child, it becomes anemic, sometimes crippled; besides, it helps to keep wages down by being taken to work at a low scale of remuneration.  Then the doctor went on to speak of the prolificness of wretchedness, the swarming of the lower classes.  Was not the most hateful natality of all that which meant the endless increase of starvelings and social rebels?

“I perfectly understand you,” Beauchene ended by saying, without any show of anger, as he abruptly brought his perambulations to an end.  “You want to place me in contradiction with myself, and make me confess that I accept Moineaud’s seven children and need them, whereas I, with my fixed determination to rest content with an only son, suppress, as it were, a family in order that I may not have to subdivide my estate.  France, ’the country of only sons,’ as folks say nowadays—­that’s it, eh?  But, my dear fellow, the question is so intricate, and at bottom I am altogether in the right!”

Then he wished to explain things, and clapped his hand to his breast, exclaiming that he was a liberal, a democrat, ready to demand all really progressive measures.  He willingly recognized that children were necessary, that the army required soldiers, and the factories workmen.  Only he also invoked the prudential duties of the higher classes, and reasoned after the fashion of a man of wealth, a conservative clinging to the fortune he has acquired.

Mathieu meanwhile ended by understanding the brutal truth:  Capital is compelled to favor the multiplication of lives foredoomed to wretchedness; in spite of everything it must stimulate the prolificness of the wage-earning classes, in order that its profits may continue.  The law is that there must always be an excess of children in order that there may be enough cheap workers.  Then also speculation on the wages’ ratio wrests all nobility from labor, which is regarded as the worst misfortune a man can be condemned to, when in reality it is the most precious of boons.  Such, then, is the cancer preying upon mankind.  In countries of political equality and economical inequality the capitalist regime, the faulty distribution of wealth, at once restrains and precipitates the birth-rate by perpetually increasing the wrongful apportionment of means.  On one side are the rich folk with “only” sons, who continually increase their fortunes; on the other, the poor folk, who, by reason of their unrestrained prolificness, see the little they possess crumble yet more and more.  If labor be honored to-morrow, if a just apportionment of wealth be arrived at, equilibrium will be restored.  Otherwise social revolution lies at the end of the road.