FEATURES OF THE INDIAN FAMINE.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 1039, 24 October 1877, Page 3

FEATURES OF THE INDIAN FAMINE.

A writer in Bangalore on August sth says :—ln the midst of a famine so terrible as this is, one cannot help writing on the subject which is in everyone’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 till the very worst comes, unless something like a miracle lakes place. The actual price of grain has declined to a trifling extent, but the fact is that amongst the really famine stricken there is no buying power left. Their money, their ornaments, their cattle, their clothes have gone long ago to purchase food; their houses have been dismantled to sell the thatch and rafters for a few pice, and in too many instances (think what it is to be dying of starvation!) the very honor of their wives or daughters has been bartered for food. This is plain speaking, but it 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 which 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 to ask for food, except with their imploring eyes. As for deaths from famine within this city of Bangalore, they are so continualaiid 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 commencement of the distress. It will take long and severe fighting in European and Asiatic Turkey before the death-roll of the combatants amounts to half as much as this, arid yet how nmol) wo hear of the one, and iiow little of the other great struggle — the uui against Turkey and the nobler war against Famine. The editor of the Madras Times” estipaates, in a vivid letter, that the famine he 9

already caused, directly or indirectly, the deaths of half a million natives ; and he does not recoil from an estimate of at least tenfold that mortality, or the death of five million natives, within the next few months. We may shrink from so ghastly a calculation, and it may be hoped we shall be able to avert some of this destruction of • but if we take into account the indirect as well as the direct influence of the famine, even this estimate may bo none too high. Behind and besides the actual deaths from starvation come a vast number from its after effects—from the disease, the constitutional feebleness, the undermining of the whole strength of the population which such a famine entails. The people 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 powers of endurance. There are horrible and miserable scenes enough in the world, no doubt; but we question whether anything so terrible could be witnessed at this moment as this spectacle of the population of half a continent thus perishing in the agonies of starvation.