Hence it may perhaps be inferred that this represents the normal rate. That falls far short of the geometrical rate which the Malthusians would have us expect. The physiological truth, as expounded by experts in these matters would seem to be that in proportion as subsistence is more abundant and of a better kind, life more regular and artificial, fertility decreases. Scientific physicists point as proof of this statement to the fact that wild animals when domesticated or in good condition are less prolific than in their normally savage and poor state. So it is with women in the western wilds of Ireland, or in the Scotch Highlands. As their food and clothing are scarce and coarse, their maternity increases. The inference from the facts now cited clearly is that whatever the terms of the Malthusian proposition may mean, their significance does not warrant the conclusions that ardent Malthusians have at all times drawn from them.
But it has been asserted that famine and plague are the Divinely appointed checks to the growth of population; thus showing some external restraint upon the multiplication of the race to be necessary to prevent population outstripping subsistence. The most familiar proofs offered of such an assertion are the periodical famines in India, especially that in the province of Orissa, and the Irish famine from the potato failure in 1846. On these proofs the following remarks suggest themselves. In the case of Orissa, numbers had nothing to do with the famine or consequent mortality; the people died because the heat of the sun untempered by rain literally scorched the food supply out of existence; if there had been only as many hundreds as there were millions, the same calamitous result, though on a numerically smaller scale, would have ensued; a province of Central India was decimated because the food did not exist. The famine therefore was real.
In the case of Ireland, no famine at the close of the first decade of the Queen's reign existed in the same sense that it had done in Orissa; the potato crop alone failed; corn, dairy produce, food products generally were plentiful; corn in fact was being exported from Ireland while the Irish themselves were perishing from starvation. The calamity therefore was less the stoppage of supplies by Providence as a check on population than a pecuniary failure. Nor was it a visitation as regards which man could plead exemption from responsibility. The potato rot did not come upon the Irish peasantry in a day or in a week. The disease had appeared in Eastern Europe so early as 1844 and 1843; it was scientifically certain that eventually it would reach Ireland. When, after due warning it attacked the plots of miserable soil reclaimed by peasant industry from hillside and bog, the destruction of the staple of native food wrought by it was gradual. Weeks and months were required to complete the process of rotting. Nothing was done. The people died not from the unkindness of nature, but from the neglect of man. Had the prudential restraints of the Malthusians limited the numbers to half the actual total, the agrarian policy which was responsible for the diet of potatoes instead of corn would have resulted in the same poverty and, therefore, in the same death.[48]