Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/21

 time, where there are a hundred now seeking employment there will then be a hundred and twenty. This will not apply simply to one industry, but will be the case throughout the whole country. It will also further happen that in ten years' time for every hundred who now require food, fuel, and clothing, a similar provision will have to be made for one hundred and twenty. It therefore follows that, low as the general average standard of living now is, it cannot by any means be obtained, unless in ten years' time the supply of all the commodities of ordinary consumption can be increased by 20 per cent., without their becoming more costly." The continually rising price of food is one of the most certain signs that population in England is pressing over hard on the means of subsistence; although our own corn and meat production is enormously supplemented by supplies from abroad, prices are always going up, and the large amount of adulteration practised in every food-supplying trade is, to a great extent, an effort to equalise the supply and the demand. Much of the food on which our poor live is unwholesome in the extreme; let anyone walk through the poorer districts of London, or of any large town and see the provisions lying for sale in the shops; it is not only the meat sold for cooking at home, the doubtful sugar, and not doubtful apology for butter, the blue milk, the limp and flabby vegetables—but let the inquirer stop at the cook-shop and inspect the fish, unpleasant both to eye and smell, in itself and in its cooking; the "faggots"—the eating of which killed a child the other day; the strangely shaped and strangely marked lumps of what should be meat, and, after an hour's walk, the searcher will not wonder at the wan, haggard faces of those who support life on this untempting fare. Even of this fare, however, there is not enough; the low fever so sadly common in poor districts, the "falling away," the hollow cough, the premature old age, all these are the results of insufficiency of food—insufficiency which does not kill at once, but slowly and surely starves away the life. Much of the drunkenness, most common in the poorest districts, has its root in lack of food; the constantly craving stomach is stilled with drink, which it would not desire if it were better filled.

But the pressure on the means of subsistence has other consequences than the living on unwholesome food. One of the earliest signs of too rapidly increasing population is the overcrowding of the poor. Just as the overcrowded