The Feilding Star. SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1892. The Famine in Russia

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 88, 23 January 1892, Page 2

The Feilding Star. SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1892. The Famine in Russia

We are informed by a writer in the Fortnightly that the famine in Russia extends over a much larger area, but is not a whit more intense than it was last year, five, ten, or fifteen years ago. The district affected extends from Odessa to the shores of the Black Sea through Littje Eussia, athwart the rich black loam country celebrated for its marvellous fertility, straight through the country watered by the Volga, across the Urals, growing wider and wider till it reaches Tobolsk; in other words it covers a tract of land 3000 miles long, and from 500 to 1000 miles broad, which supports a population of only forty millions. The intense cold of sprint; was followed by a protracted drought that parched and stunted the crops and dried up the grass. Hundreds of thousands of men and women are prowling about the country begging for bread, and most of these are suffering from dysentery, scurvy, and other diseases. Their eyelids are swollen to monstrous dimensions ; then faces pinched and withered, and their whole persons shrivelled from the likeness of aught human into horrible ghosts and shadows. Suicide from hunger is very frequent. " Hunger bread " upon which they are attempting to quiet the pangs of hunger, resembles a lump of black earth covered with a coating of mould This is a terrible picture. For tunately there are hundreds of thousands of good and charitable people in other parts of the civilised world who have joined heart and hand in the good work of relieving the sufferings of these poor people, and day by day food supplies are reaching them from all sides. Those wretched scoundrels the Russian officials, who, by their robberies and crimes have done so much to increase the evils of the famine, have been removed from office, and their opportunities of doing harm much lessened, so that the work of dispensing relief has been made easier, while the food will neither be adulterated, nor sold before it reaches those for whom it is intended.