Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/30

 the pressure of over-population. Too often, indeed, do these come under the head of the positive, the life-destroying checks.

To turn to a different and more immediately life-destroying class of checks, that of war cannot, of course, be left out of this melancholy picture. The Franco-German war, in 1870, the Turco-Russian war now going on, have both been sensible checks to the populations of their respective countries. The great famine now raging in India is a positive check on a still more frightful scale, and we have seen that this terrible famine results entirely from over-population; the evidence of Lord Derby may be taken as conclusive upon this point: but is it possible to accept Lord Derby's facts, and yet make no kind of effort to solve the question which, he says, "does not seem to me to be a light one"? It is all very well to say that: "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."

But what a confession of helplessness! Is it possible to sit down with folded hands and calmly contemplate the recurrence at regular intervals of such a famine as is now slaying its tens of thousands? Yet the law of population is "an irrefragable truth," and these people are starved to death according to natural law; early marriages, large families, these are the premisses; famine and disease, these are the conclusions. The same consequences will, sooner or later—sooner in an agricultural country, dependent on its crops, later in a manufacturing country commanding large foreign supplies, but always inexorably—produce the same fearful results.

One more melancholy positive check must be added, the last to which we shall here refer. It is the absolute child-murder by desertion or by more violent means: Dr. Lankester said that "there were in London alone 16,000 women who had murdered their offspring." Dr. Attwood lately stated of Macclesfield that the doctors in that town often had moral, though not legal, proof that children were "put away," and that Macclesfield was "no worse than any other manufacturing town."

Such are some of the consequences of the law of population; the power of production is held in check by the continual destruction, the number of births is balanced by the number of deaths. Population struggles to increase, but the want of the