THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 125 



admits them. The sons have no aspiration to live 

 differently from their parents, or to rise above the 

 style of living in which they have been reared. This 

 was the case in Ireland. The majority of the agri- 

 cultural tenants, when Arthur Young visited the island 

 in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, farmed 

 from five to ten acres, as their fathers and grand- 

 fathers had done. As the area under cultivation was 

 extended, it was portioned out into farms of the same 

 size, so that the young peasants had no difficulty in 

 acquiring farms, and were thus enabled to marry at 

 an early age. The superabundant population of 

 Ireland, accordingly, was in no way due to the 

 operation of the theory of Malthus. There took place 

 in Ireland what almost invariably happens where 

 population is increasing, an exemplification of the 

 fact that the means of living tend to increase faster than 

 population ; for whereas in a century and a half the 

 population had grown eightfold, the means of sub- 

 sistence had grown from twelve to twentyfold. 



Disciples of Malthus, and all who regard the theory 

 of Malthus as the impregnable outwork of the doctrine 

 of Natural Selection and its citadel of defence, speak 

 of India as a striking exemplification of the evils 

 wrought by a systematic attempt to thwart the opera- 

 tion of the checks by which, according to Malthus, 

 Nature prevents over-population. They lament the 

 mischief inflicted upon India by the benevolent 

 purpose of the British regime first, in attempting 

 by sanitary measures to mitigate and lessen the 



