Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/19

 epidemics and famines have ceased to sweep over Europe, but for how long? This decrease of natural checks to population, consequent on advancing civilization, has, unfortunately, a very dark side. Darwin has remarked: "Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount." A signal instance of the truth of this remark is now being given to us in our Indian empire by the introduction there of Western civilization; Lord Derby says: "We have established there order and peace; we have done away with local wars; we have lessened the ravages of pestilence; and we do what we can—and, in ordinary seasons, we do it with success—to mitigate the effects of destitution. The result is, naturally and necessarily, a vast increase in population; and, if present appearances can be trusted, we shall have in every generation a larger aggregate of human beings relying upon us for help in those periods of distress which must, from time to time, occur in a country wholly agricultural and liable to droughts." So that it appears that our civilization in India, taking away the ordinary natural checks to population, and introducing no others in their stead, brings about a famine which has already destroyed more than 500,000 people in one Presidency alone, and has thrown about one and a half million more on charity. From this point of view civilization can scarcely be regarded as an unmixed blessing, and it must not be forgotten that what is happening in India now must, sooner or later, happen in every country where science destroys the balance of nature.

Ireland suffered thirty years ago from exactly the same cause which has now touched India—over-population. Professor Fawcett, in his Essay on Pauperism, writes as follows:—"Ireland should serve to warn us of the terrible misfortunes brought upon a country by an undue increase of population. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population of that country was about two millions; maintaining for the next 150 years a smaller rate of increase than is now going on in England, the two millions had grown into eight millions in the year 1847. The country, at this time, became so densely peopled that a considerable portion of the nation could only obtain the barest subsistence; still nothing was done to avert the suffering that was certain to ensue; the people went on marrying with as much recklessness as if they were the first settlers in a new