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] One is not here concerned with the abstract truth of the theory of population enounced by Malthus, but with its applicability to, or its instructiveness in the case of, the England of Queen Victoria. What then are the facts of population here to be dealt with? The multiplication of the inhabitants of this country is known never to have been so rapid as during the century which opens with the French Revolution in 1793, and which witnesses at its close the sixtieth anniversary of Her Majesty's accession. Earlier periods of augmentation may therefore be omitted. A hundred years ago, Dr Price, maintaining population actually to have decreased, spoke of its decline as a great danger. Cobbett and other more accurate observers, or less incautious generalizers, in opposition to Dr Price, established circumstantially the fact of an increase; but the possibility of a contrary view being taken is as suggestive as it now seems remarkable.