THE FAMINE IN CHINA.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1100, 12 April 1911, Page 3

THE FAMINE IN CHINA.

■ A PITIFUL LETTEK. The following is air extract from a loiter just received from Yang-Chow, China, dated February 23, 1911:— "If only you could have been with me to-day as I went outside the West Gate. I wonder what you would have thought and done? 1 think I know you would have wept as I did to behold the sorrow of the people. As I was coming back, and passing hundreds living in huts like animals, 1 saw at a corner a poor woman weeping for the two children that had just passed away from fever ami starvation, while her husband is lying very ill from the lack of food, and she with Ihe other three children' almost starved also. Oh, the pain of it! You have never seen anything like it, I am sure. The gratitude of that poor, poor starved and halffrozen woman I : shall' not soon forget. This is only one of tho thousauds, nay l?us of thousands, and the vision of that other (almost, siarvod'to death) woman who was awaiting me at home just haunted me—thirteen days with only a bite of food and some days none at all, for she is too ill to stand the crushing to get the tiny allowance granted far a time to some of the poor. About sixteen were trampled to death in their attempt in ono day. Oh, for a .Rockefeller's or a Carnegie's "wealth there would not then be what now exists. Last night 1 saw about 200 men, women, ami children sitting on the ground in the fierce and biting cold—enough to freeze anyone—waiting for their littlo basin of thin rico griiol, which a wealthy man gives in order to accumulate merit—tncro arc sometimes several hundred waiting for hours, and many of them only a sheet of matting to cover thorn. This is what is burdening my heart now, and I suppose that is why I am telling you—it pierces me—and how little one can do for them." Contributions would be received and remitted by Captain Blackburn.