We have on various occasions, in distinct opposition to the school of which the late Mr. Mill took the management, pointed out how under certain circum stances an infinitesimal division of land has a tendency not [only to increase population, but to degrade the inhabitants to the lowest level of humanity. How in China, in fact, the result of the exaggerated honour paid to agriculture, and the desire to make each district self-supporting, had been to increase human life to a limit where human labour had had to enter into fierce competition with that of the lower animals; and so overstocked had the land become, that chronic famines, rebellions or pestilences were the only means left to restore the natural order of events. Com-meuting, but a few days ago, on the famine in Behar, we drew attention to the fact that a very similar state of affairs existed there. This condition had not been inaugurated by the British Government of India; but curiously enough the very virtues of that Government had had a tendency to increase the susceptibility of the population to natural, by the relief it afforded them from political, scourges. Much the same course of events had happened in Ireland during the first half of the present century. The strong Government of England had put down the check afforded to overpopulation by internecine struggles; the Inndlord allowed his property to be divided and subdivided into small holdings, till at last these became reduced to the smallest limit capable of supporting life. The natural result arrived in course of time; the husbandman set himself to raise, not the most profitable, for profit there was not, but the most readily raised and satisfying crop. He grew enough of potatoes for his own family, and his family responded by.incrensing till they were able to consume all the potatoes raised.' The peasant had no interest in raising more than his own requirements demanded, for he could neither sell nor store them and potatoes, beyond the necessaries of life, afforded little scope for luxurious treatment. So when potatoes failed, the population, which had linked its existence with that of the bulb, had with it to fade off the face of the ground tilia new equilibrium was restored between production and consumption.
The old adage which the potato famine in Treland made universal—that a population which depends on one sole crop is in a dangerous position, and must sooner or later give way before some such catastrophe as occurred in the years 1847-48—was true as far as it went, but was only part of a larger truth. The reduction of the crop to one, and that the most easily raised, is the natural result of the ultimate subdivision of land; and nothing naturally tends to that subdivision so much as the want of proper and sufficient means of intercoramunication, In Ireland and India this want has mainly proceeded from natural causes; but there are causes, of which China affords the most crucial instance, where this isolation has been part of a deliberate policy of government, The Pall Mall Budget of the 12th December, in an article headed Contemporary Enthusiasm and Contemporary Facts," urges strongly the same arguments as ourselves, with regard to the Bengal famine. "Suppose, for example, that the sect which admires those latest. theories of Mr. Mill, which in all probability he justly attributed to some influence altogether foreign to the natural working of his own powerful intellect, were to turn from pure speculation to that hardest and most frightful of facts, the Bengal famine? Here is a region in which the earth has for the most part been treated as the common property of all. Private property hardly exists in the soil. The great majority of people employed on the land have some sort of legal interest on it. The unearned increment' of rent and a good deal besides has been systematic cally appropriated by the State, and, of late years at all events, has been spent by it with the best intention of promoting the general good. Yet what has been the result? he limitation of the struggle for existence produced by the natural Communism of India, has simply enabled the human race to multiply like insects which have no natural enemy to prey upon them. A horde of sixty millions of people divide between them the produce of a territorial area which, for so vast a multitude, is extremely small, and exist for a series of years on the lowest supply of food which will support life. The effect is to place these swarming millions at the mercy of the caprices of Nature. Once in a century she sends next to no rain, and two or three times much too little, and then these Bengalees die like flies in an unseasonable frost. Their very multitude makes their ordinary necessities so great that they cannot accumulate stores of food, and they pay as a whole for the luxury of living on boiled rice by the periodical torture of death by hunger." When will the self-styled "thinkers " who are now flooding Europe with strange fancies, learn to use the eyes and faculties with which nature has blessed them, to investigate facts? When will they' learn that knowledge is to be gained by looking out on the world, not within on themselves, or. what they fancy to be themselves? Communism and Commu-rustic ideas are no new off-shoot of the nineteenth century, there are many countries in Asia where their lasting effects have been experienced. The China of fact as opposed to the China of fancy, is not the least instructive,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.