Tea at Trianon: Hungarian Fertility Rates Rise

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Hungarian Fertility Rates Rise

From Breitbart:

“The country is not just experiencing a fertility spike; Hungary is winding back the clock on much of the fertility and family-structure transition that demographers have long considered inevitable,” writes the author of “Is Hungary Experiencing a Policy-Induced Baby Boom?” from the Institute for Family Studies website. “That’s unusual,” author Lyman Stone wrote, “as most countries around the world are currently experiencing stable or falling fertility, especially in Europe.”

Mr Stone suggests that fiscal implications — such as subsidies for married couples buying houses, a change in tax deductions for children, and a growing economy — likely only played a small part on their own and estimates that those factors, coupled with cultural policies, were what had brought about the rise in fertility rate.

Stone points to Hungary’s pro-family constitution adopted in 2011 which stated that “We believe that our children and grandchildren will make Hungary great again,” and which defends “the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman… and the family as the basis of the nation’s survival.” (Read more.)