any things considered necessities
which were considered luxuries or entirely unheard of a generation ago,
the Oriental peasant or town working-man is finding it harder and harder
to make both ends meet. As one writer well phrases it: "These altered
economic conditions have not as yet brought the ability to meet them.
The cost of living has increased faster than the resources of the
people."[259]

One of the main (though not sufficiently recognized) causes of the
economic-social crisis through which the Orient is to-day passing is
over-population. The quick breeding tendencies of Oriental peoples have
always been proverbial, and have been due not merely to strong sexual
appetites but also to economic reasons like the harsh exploitation of
women and children, and perhaps even more to religious doctrines
enjoining early marriage and the begetting of numerous sons. As a
result, Oriental populations have always pressed close upon the limits
of subsistence. In the past, however, this pressure was automatically
lightened by factors like war, misgovernment, pestilence, and famine,
which swept off such multitudes of people that, despite high
birth-rates, populations remained at substantially a fixed level. But
here, as in every other phase of Eastern life, Western influences have
radically altered the situation. The extension of European political
control over Eastern lands has meant the putting down of internal
strife, the diminution of governmental abuses, the decrease of disease,
and the lessening of the blight of famine. In other words, those
"natural" checks which previously kept down the population have been
diminished or abolished, and in response to the life-saving activities
of the West, the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept Oriental
populations from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions
comparable with the low death-rate of Western nations. But to lower the
Orient's prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. As a matter of
fact, that birth-rate keeps up with undiminished vigour, and the
consequence has been a portentous increase of population in nearly every
portion of the Orient under Western political control. In fact, even
those Oriental countries which have maintained their independence have
more or less adopted Western life-conserving methods, and have
experienced in greater or less degree an accelerated increase of
population.

The phenomena of over-population are best seen in Indi