APPALLING FAMINE IN SWEDEN.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 11484, 17 January 1903, Page 8

APPALLING FAMINE IN SWEDEN.

70,000 PEOPLE THREATENED WITH STARVATION.

United Prese Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. (Received January 16th, 9.5 a.m.) STOCKHOLM, January 15. Seventy thousand people are threatened with starvation in Northern Sweden. Many are reduced to the necessity of eating moss. Energetic relwf measures are being organised. "I Shave just returned from the faminestricken districts of Northern Sweden, a land mostly of enow-covered mountains, bogs, and trout streams," wrote the "Daily Mail's" Stockholm correspondent last month. "The harvest has been destroyed by the heavy rains, the fields are completely under water, and hay, corn, and potatoes are aU spoiled. "The poor peasants can find no food lor their animate, and the cows, their last resource, are being killed for food. They have had to make the coarse cakes known as •'famine bread, ,, and in a email village •which I visited, they had for five weeks eaten no other bread but this. Although used to privations, they could hardly stand this poor, gritty food, and there was great fear of an outbreak of typhoid.

"But the cry of distress from the north has been heard, and the more prosperous farmers in Southern Sweden have given a portion of "their rich harvest to their suffering brethren. Many regiments, offlceiß and men'alike, have given up a day's pay to the famine sufferers, and collections in churches and theatrical performances have swelled the relief funde. There are now 1000 Waggon loads of provisions going north, and extra relief trains axe running daily."

The correspondent sent several samples of the "famine bread" eaten in the villages. One piece resembled a mixture 'ot chaff and road-ecrapings, and the other was suggestive equally of concrete and very coarse oatcake mixed with chaff. Botn gpecimens were hard, dark, and brittle.