The Globe. MONDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1877.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 1031, 15 October 1877, Page 2

The Globe. MONDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1877.

The success which has attended the efforts of the committee appointed to obtain subscriptions towards the Indian Famine Relief Fund is creditable to the public of Christctvurch. The handsome sum collected on Friday and Saturday Avill no doubt be largely added to during the next ten days, and an amount remitted from Canterbury, indicative of the liberality of the inhabitants, and of the wealth of the district. No effort will be spared by the committee to secure funds. The churches have been appealed to, and collections will be made, we hope, in every congregation throughout the province next Sunday in aid of the fund. Y"et another mode of rasing funds will be adopted next Monday. It is proposed to hold a muff cricket match in fancy costume on the cricket grounds, on which occasion the players will consist of some of our leading citizens. To satisfy all tastes, there will be a Harrison's show, Aunt Sally, and other games, and a band will be in attendance during the day. At the gates every one who enters will be invited to contribute towards the Belief Fund. As the promoters intend to ask the Mayor to proclaim a public holiday, we feel sure that the undertaking will be a great success, and that a large sum will be added to the funds by the day's proceedings. The appalling nature of the famine, which, according to the latest telegrams, had got beyond all control, may be gathered from the following extracts from a London contemporary: —" In the threatened districts of that vast tract, equal seven Englands, there live certainly fourteen and more probably twenty millions of people, nine-tenths of whom are entirely dependent upon the crops for subsistence, while onethird at least live from hand to mouth, never a month before the world, and usually in a condition which in this country would be described as one of extreme and dangerous destitution. Even among them there is a 'residuum,' still more deplorably situated. * * * Upon this population, these sixteen millions, already so tried that they sell their poor jewels, their sole surplus, at the rate of £BO,OOO a month, by the Mint accounts alone — upon the three millions more who have passed this stage, have sold all, and are giving up the struggle—upon this one million, who have given it up already, and are waiting death by disease in the vast encampments fed

bv the State, there is about to descend the unspeakable horror of a second year of want —six more months at least during which nothing will be attainable, not even grass, except from the State alms. * * * The new famine district is not a province, it is a continent. The villages are scattered, the population thin, the people, as Professor Monier Williams recently painted them, though industrious, unenergetic. There is not one great and navigable river. There is throughout but one railway, and in districts like kingdoms no railway at all. There are few roads worthy of the name. * * * There is nothing for it but ' relief centres,' and relief centres under such circumstances imply bursts of depopulating disease. Let any soldier acquainted with camps think of encampments with fifty thousand souls in each —men, women, and children—all arriving half-fed, and living on half rations, stationed by streams and tanks for the sake of water, scarcely housed, and living amid tropical odours and miasmas, and he at least will recognise all the elements of the new disease which first struck Lord Hastings' camps in the Pindarree war, and has ever since terrified the world as Asiatic cholera. The prospect is appalling, but if the second year of famine foils —and Lord Salisbury believes it to be falling —there is no remedy that man can apply. We are carefully avoiding exaggeration, when we say it is not only possible, it is imminently probable, that the population of Southern India will this year be reduced by four millions, who have perished of hunger, and the diseases which hunger long-continued leaves behind in its train."