According to him, "the healthy ideal of every young man is to found a family, a house of infinite duration, to create and to rule." Why in modern France does he give his thoughts to "pleasure and of excelling in his career"?
Why does he regard marriage "without enthusiasm, as a last measure, as a 'settling-down,' and not as a beginning, the commencement of a veritable career, subordinating all others to it and regarding these, pecuniary and professional, as auxiliary and as means ?"--After the tendency to marriage, "the tendency to paternity." How does the shrunken family come to live only for itself?
In what way, in default of other interests,--homestead, domain, workshop, lasting local undertakings,--how does the heart, now deprived of its food by the lack of invisible posterity, fall back on affection for visible progeny ?[5103] In a country where there are few openings, where careers are overcrowded, what are the effects of this paid idolatry[5104], and, to sum up in one phrase, in what way does the French system of to-day tend to develop the most fatal of results, the decline in the birth rate?
Here the study of institutions on a grand scale terminated.

Formerly, M.Taine had contemplated a completion of his labors by a description of contemporary France, the product of origins scrutinized by him and of which he had traced the formation.

Having disengaged his factors he meant to combine them, to show them united and acting in concert, all centering on the great actual facts which dominate the rest and which determine the order and structure of modern society.

As he had given a picture of old France he aimed to portray France as it now is, with its various groups,--village, small town and large city,--with its categories of men, peasants, workmen, bourgeois, functionaries and capitalists; with the forces that impel each class along, their passions, their ideas, their desires.

Besides the numerical statistics of person he meant to have set forth the moral statistics of souls.
According to him, psychological conditions exist which render the social activity of men possible or impossible.