China seems to answer to this description.

If the accounts we have of it are to be trusted, the lower classes of people are in the habit of living almost upon the smallest possible quantity of food and are glad to get any putrid offals that European labourers would rather starve than eat.

The law in China which permits parents to expose their children has tended principally thus to force the population.

A nation in this state must necessarily be subject to famines.

Where a country is so populous in proportion to the means of subsistence that the average produce of it is but barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, any deficiency from the badness of seasons must be fatal.