300,000 CHILDREN STARVING.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2133, 16 July 1907, Page 3

300,000 CHILDREN STARVING.

RUSSIAN INFANTS FED WITH RAW CUCUMBERS. Dr. Kennard, the Society of Friends’ agent in the Russian famine area, writes from Samara on May 1: “The winter snows have vanished; the green grass shows its welcome color to 150,000,000 people who for seven long winter months have gazed On a monotonous white pall; the sun reveals with its brilliant light one of the saddest pictures that man can witness—millions craving for bread, millions exhausted by seven months of hunger, relying for aid on what their Government seems incapable of giving them, and forced to be content to exist on the charity of the Russian Zemstvos and o'ther organisations. Twenty million people in six south-eastern provinces as large as half the United States are relying on this support, and it is estimated that in the Samara Government only 10 per cent are able to be aided effectively.

“The peasantry are not only without sufficient sustenance, but they are without belongings. Their cattle and horses have long since been sld, to bring in bread —horses for which, in prosperity, they gave £5 to £7 10s have been sold for 16s, for a hungry . stomach makes a bad bargainer. In countless cases the isbas (cottages) in the villages are roofless, denuded of straw to feed the cattle, and ‘combinations’ are the recognised custom —that is, four to five families club together, chose the best isba to live in, and break up the remainder for fuel. “In Samara alone there are 300,000 children, who need milk and cannot get it: their constitutions are being weakened by eating black bread and raw salt cucumbers. Ufa, we now hear is incomparably worse. “Meanwhile the Zemstvos, I can sincerely attest, are doing their work methodically, genuinely economically, and as rapidly as possible. I can heartily and thoroughly recommend their system as heartily as I can recommend the system or want of system of the Russian Red Cross. I appeal to my countrymen, to America, and to the wide world for funds, and that at once.”