Thus, statistics show that more than half the human beings born die from accidents or ailments before reaching marriageable age. Of those who actually reach that age, an uncertain, but considerable proportion fail to find mates; the men perhaps because they are over fastidious or selfish; the women possibly because they lack attractions of dower or person. With many more the course of true love runs crooked; the desired partner not being attainable, a solitary life is led. In other cases, the fear of not being able to maintain a conventional position acts as a deterrent. Then there is the considerable percentage of cases where legitimate opportunities of marriage are denied. Thus Colonial frontier men in solitary wilds have few opportunities of courtship or matrimony. Soldiers constantly changing their station; or sailors with a brevet wife in every port, are not usually marrying men, or the founders of numerous families. Of those who marry, many have no children, some have only one; others have sickly children who die. On the assumption that everyone in the world married, each pair must have two children to keep up the population.
Hence the critics of the Malthusian theory have calculated that, striking out of their count those who cannot or will not marry, and those who, marrying, are childless; merely to maintain the population without increasing it, every married couple ought to produce a family of six. Though according to the Malthusians themselves this sufficiently liberal allowance of progeny might be reached without any calamitous consequences, practical acquaintance with the contingencies of domestic life shows that this quantum will not often be reached. If in any part of the world there existed conditions favourable to marriage and to fecundity, it was in Australia, shortly after the earliest gold discoveries, but when many immense fortunes had been made in farming; here there was work for all, wages were high, living cheap, cultivable, but uncultivated land abounded; finally there were no catastrophic checks from earthquake, pestilence or famine to the multiplication of human beings; if, therefore, the Malthusian doctrine could anywhere be verified, surely it would be here. Notwithstanding all these inducements to marriage and the propagation of the species, the actual rate of population increase was 2 per cent. a year.