The strength of the French industrial
system does not consist in the large and efficient use of machinery, but
in its multitude of skilled craftsmen and the excellence of their
handiwork. In a system of this kind, labor naturally receives a large
percentage of the gross product, and a larger proportion of wage-earners
reach an independent economic position. At first sight it looks as if
France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to
escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic
organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.
But the situation is not without another and less favorable aspect.
France, in becoming a country of small and extremely thrifty property
owners, has also become a country of partial economic parasites with
very little personal initiative and energy. Individual freedom has been
sacrificed to economic and social equality; and this economic and social
equality has not made for national cohesion. The bourgeois, the
mechanic, and the farmer, in so far as they have accumulated property,
are exhibiting an extremely calculating individualism, of which the most
dangerous symptom is the decline in the birth-rate.
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