CIVILISATION SUBMERGED.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 91, 18 April 1922, Page 4

CIVILISATION SUBMERGED.

There is fresh first-hand evidence today of the appalling condition into which great areas of Russia have fallen. A doctor who has returned from the Ukraine reports that whole communities have annk to the level of barbarism. Tbe population is dying en masse, and people are ready to eat anything from animal refuse to human flesh. The Ukraine used to be one of the great grain-producing districts of Russia, but the drain of the war, followed by internal struggles between Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks, and then th_ drought, have-brought- it to the terrible pm described Dr. Xansen paints a similar picture of conditions in other parte of Russia. "He had expected in the famine region to ace suffering and death," he said in an appeal to the English public in February last. "But he had not expected to find whole villages, whole towns, whole provinces sitting in their homes waiting for death to take them— too weak to fetch the food that might save them. He had not expected to find thousands upon thousands of families with nothing but a few handfuls of straw and dung between them and death, yet still hoping for the grain that would save their children's lives. He had.not expected to find men and women who a few months ago were among the prosperous and civilised peoples of the world, driven by hunger to acts of dark and savage madness. Yet he had found places where the people had faced the spectre of death by famine through so many hopeless weeks that they had lost all human sentiment; places where they soon after went to the graveyards to dig the corpses from the graves that they might eat and live." Ye. conditions had become worse in the meantime, for in some places hunger-maddened men and women were not only going to the graveyards for food, but were killing one another in the frenzy of their despair. Prof. Meredith Atkinson, of Australia, found what he regards as undoubted evidence of cannibalism. What is happening in Russia is not only the destruction of whole communities, but the reversion of men and women to conditions of remote barbarism.

Contemplating this vast tragedy, one may speculate ac tat the depth of the wound that civilisation has suffered and its after effects. History shows that nations do not always recover quickly from great struggles and catastrophes, that indeed the effects may be irremediable. Rome went through her tremendous duel with Hannibal nearly two centuries before the foundation of the Empire, but there are historians who think that she never recovered completely from it, but that the exhaustion of Italy and the economic changes produced sowed the seeds of ultimate decay and dissolution. It has also been doubted whether the German world ever fully recovered from the effects of the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century. There is a resemblance between the conditions in parts of Europe to-day and those produced by that terrible struggle. "Before the war the population was about twenty millions; after it the number was probably five or seven millions, and cannot have been more than ten. Whole towns and villages were laid in ashes, and vast districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by hundreds, and to such straits were the people often reduced that cannibalism is -aid to have been not uncommon. . . _ 'lhe population was not only impoverished and reduced in numbers, but broken in spirit. It lost confidence in, itself, and for a time effected in polities, literature, art, and science little that is worthy of serious study." To-day the forces of destruction are more terrible, and because of the advance made ov civilisation, •communities are more vulnerable. Even if relief comes to Eastern Europe quickly and conditions begin to improve immediately, these territories may show a century or two hence signs of the dreadful ordeal through which they are passing.