TAXES ON BIRTHS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 60, 22 July 1907, Page 4

TAXES ON BIRTHS.

it Plol, the French .Senator who, in view of tin' declining birth-rate in France, has proposed a bounty upon large families, is either a very sanguine theorist or deplorably wanting in knowledge as to the effect of similar bounties in the past. Taking the first of these assumptions to be the correct one, he evidently Iwlieves lh.it theory nuy prove stronger than all past experience. For history is dead again liini. Many such bounties have been tried and all have failed. A pertinent example is offered in the history of French Canada. In the seventeenth century French Canadian officials were murk exercised over the abundant growth of population in New England as compared with their own. So they devised a lionnty of ail ascending scale. With every increase the bounty paid was doubled, and when a man could show a family of a dozen children he received a substantial pension from the State. But in spite of the bounty the imputation increased but little while that in New England went up by leaps and lwunds. AUo it was found that an evil trafficking in children had arisen. When a man had a fail'ly largo family lie was always ready to pay a good price for somebody else's baby to pass off as his own, with a view of making the dozen and securing the pension In England, where the birth-rate has always been, until very recently, almost too satisfactory, it may not be generally know that births were at one time las»d. In l®» the birth of a duke carried a tax of £3O, that of a common person 2s. In 178.1, another tax was imposed. and under it, in 1800. the hard ease of a 1 i-al tailor named Nelson, in Oxford Marl-et. London, whose wife had five children at a birth, was the subject of much coin - ment.