TERRIBLE EFFECTS OF THE INDIAN FAMINE.

Clutha Leader, Volume IV, Issue 172, 26 October 1877, Page 7

TERRIBLE EFFECTS OF THE INDIAN FAMINE.

Bangalore, sth August. In the midst ofa famine so terrible ) as this is, one cannot help writing on the subject which now is in eveiyone's thoughts. Things are now even worse than at the date of my last letter, and, in fact, they must continue to get worse and worse ''ill the very worst comes, unhss something like a miracle takes place. The actual price of grain has declined to a trifling extent, but the fact is amongst the really famine-stricken there there is no buying power left. Their money, tbeir cattle, their clothes have gone long ago to purchase, food ; their houses have been dismantled to sell the thatch and rafters tor a few pice, and in too many instances (think whatitisto be d3'ing of starvation!) the very honour of their wives or daughters has been bartered for food. This is plain speaking, butit is the truth, and, with the sights we have to see it does not do to be mealy-mouthed or to gloss over the awful realities of a starving people. The worst sight, and that whioh unmans one most, are the little children, almost skeletons, every bone protruding, sometimes through the skin itself, with little wan shrunken faces, too weak to move or ask for food, except with their imploring eyes. As for deaths from famine within this city of Bangalore, they are so continual and so frequent — averaging fifteen daily — as no longer to excite public attention, while it is well known that no less than 40,000 deaths have occurred from famine and from famine-induced cholera within this province since the beginning of the distress. It will take long and «evere fighting in European and Asiatic Turkey before tbe death-roll of the combatants amounts to half as much as this, and how much we hear of the one, and how little of the other great struggle — the war against Turkey and the nobler war against Famine. The editor of the 'Madras Times' estimates, in a vivid letter, that the famine has already caused, directly or indirectly, the deaths of half a million natives ; and he does not recoil from an. estimate of at least ten-fold that mortality, or "the death of five million natives, within the next few months. We may shrink from so ghastly a calculation, and ie may be hoped we shall be able to avert some of this destruction of life-; but if we take into account the indirect as well as the direct influence of the famine, even this estimate may be none too high. Behind and besides the actual deaths from starvation come a vast number from its after effects — from the disease, the constitutional feehleness, the undermining of the whole strngth of the population, which such a famine entails. One of the mem hers of the Mysore Revenue Survey stated that, in . Bangalore there was a regular service organised, in addition to the police, to keep the streets clear of the dead and dying. Outside .he municipal limits, dead bodies, he says, are lyin^r in all : directions j the lower castes are cooking* and eating the bodies. -. -. -. Two days ago, when riding past the Hussar stables, he saw; a crowd of wretched women and children routing in the dungheap, and picking out the undigested grains of corn to eat. The people ■ who are reduced to these miserable j expedients are, as another correspondent describes them, ordinarily apathetic in the presence of death:; but-it seems to come : upon them now in too portentous

and cruel a form for even their poworg of endurance. There are horrible and miserable scenes enough in the world, no doubt; but we question whether anything so terrible could^'e witne-sed at any moment as this spectacle 'of -tho population of half a continent, thus perishing in the agonies of starvation.