M. Theodore Fix has remarked himself that in the last fifty years
the average stature of man, in France, has diminished by a
considerable fraction of an inch. This observation is worth his
previous one: upon whom does this diminution take effect?
In a report read to the Academy of Moral Sciences on the results
of the law of March 22, 1841, M. Leon Faucher expressed himself
thus:
Young workmen are pale, weak, short in stature, and slow to think
as well as to move. At fourteen or fifteen years they seem no
more developed than children of nine or ten years in the normal
state. As for their intellectual and moral development, there
are some to be found who, at the age of thirteen, have no notion
of God, who have never heard of their duties, and whose first
school of morality was a prison.
That is what M. Leon Faucher has seen, to the great displeasure
of M. Charles Dupin, and this state of things he declares that
the law of March 22 is powerless to remedy. And let us not get
angry over this impotence of the legislator: the evil arises from
a cause as necessary for us as the sun; and in the path upon
which we have entered, anger of any kind, like palliatives of any
kind, could only make our situation worse.
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