THE BRAZIL FAMINE.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1612, 21 April 1879, Page 4

THE BRAZIL FAMINE.

The simple word “famine” (says the “ Alta California ”) carries with it a sensation of dread like the words small-pox. Either is fearful enough when thought of singly ; much more so when it becomes a fact and is present with its horrors; but how indescribably more dreadful the two combined to those living subject to their double horrors. The people of Coara, Brazil, have had both of these afllictions among and upon them, and the result is that the district has been almost entirely depopulated, the people who had not died taking advantage of the opportunity given by the Government, which furnished them with the means of emigrating. A correspondent of the New York “Herald,” writing from Ceara, Brazil, in that journal of February 14th, gives about seven columns description of the terrible visitation and what he saw there. The country afflicted is a plain, and the people depend for water during part of the year, upon the bed of the dried up river, digging wells in the sand. From January to June is the rainy season. Thence to January there is little or no rain. Sometimes there is no rain the year round. Consequently failure of crops, poverty, hunger, starvation, disease, and death by hundreds of thousands of the poor people. These are reported as the most degraded class in Brazil, immoral, ignorant, filthy ; a mixed race of whites, blacks, and Indians, producing an Arab like race, “ People who have no property, and never try to rise above their normal condition,” says the correspondent. The drought commenced in 1877. No rains, no crops, sickness, death, desolation followed ; the grass, trees, vegetation died; the people abandoned their children, and even ate them. After a long time the Government gave them some assistance, and then the people became willing mendicants, receiving the Government’s bounty, giving and doing nothing in return, but simply drawing their supplies and living in idleness. From the description of the people by the correspondent, one is almost tempted to say that such a people are not deserving of aid or pity ; but, perhaps, there are exceptions—or were, for most of them have died or removed —and humanity cannot stop in such cases to question as to character. The terrible droughts brought the inevitable results, not merely hunger and starvation, but disease (the small pox) robbers who swept the country, taking the few cattle that survived the drought; and, finally, what the correspondent believes to be the veritable plague, or black death, which never before has visited our Continent. People taken with it die in two hours, turning black in spots, and then all over. There have been fearful famines in Hindostan, China, and elsewhere, even now in Morocco, but this correspondent calls the famine in Brazil the most terrible that has ever afflicted humanity.