a. Most of India
has been under British control for the greater part of a century. Even a
century ago, India was densely populated, yet in the intervening
hundred years the population has increased between two and three
fold.[260] Of course, factors like improved agriculture, irrigation,
railways, and the introduction of modern industry enable India to
support a much larger population than it could have done at the time of
the British Conquest. Nevertheless, the evidence is clear that excessive
multiplication has taken place. Nearly all qualified students of the
problem concur on this point. Forty years ago the Duke of Argyll stated:
"Where there is no store, no accumulation, no wealth; where the people
live from hand to mouth from season to season on a low diet; and where,
nevertheless, they breed and multiply at such a rate; there we can at
least see that this power and force of multiplication is no evidence
even of safety, far less of comfort." Towards the close of the last
century, Sir William Hunter termed population India's "fundamental
problem," and continued: "The result of civilized rule in India has been
to produce a strain on the food-producing powers of the country such as
it had never before to bear. It has become a truism of Indian statistics
that the removal of the old cruel checks on population in an Asiatic
country is by no means an unmixed blessing to an Asiatic people."[261]
Lord Cromer remarks of India's poverty: "Not only cannot it be remedied
by mere philanthropy, but it is absolutely certain--cruel and
paradoxical though it may appear to say so--that philanthropy enhances
the evil. In the days of Akhbar or Shah Jehan, cholera, famine, and
internal strife kept down the population. Only the fittest survived. Now
internal strife is forbidden, and philanthropy steps in and says that no
single life shall be sacrificed if science and Western energy or skill
can save it. Hence the growth of a highly congested population, vast
numbers of whom are living on a bare margin of subsistence. The fact
that one of the greatest difficulties of governing the teeming masses of
the East is caused by good and humane government should be recognized.
It is too often ignored."[262]

William Archer well states the matter when, in answer to the query why
improved external conditions have not brought India prosperity, he says:
"The reason, in my view, is simple: namely, that the benefit of good
government is, in part at any