THE TOLL OF DEATH

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 119, 16 November 1926, Page 9

THE TOLL OF DEATH

SOVIET RUSSIA'S SHARE SOME APPALLING STATISTICS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN' FRANCISCO, 20th October. War, pestilence, famine, and cataclysms of Nature have taken toll of (f2,000,000 human lives since the outbreak of the World War, states the as-, sistant-direetor of the Leaguo of Red Cross Societies, in an estimate made at Washington. By categories, the war accounted for 9,000,000, civil war for G',000,000, famine for 6,000,000, epidemic, for 40,000,000, earthquake and flood for 2,000,000. First jn rank among the visitations of Nature has been influenza, the secret of which is still to bo traced and mastered. .It has been estimated that, between May, 1918, and March, 1919, influenza cut off 25,000,000 lives, or not less than 2 per cent, of tho entire popu-, lation of the world. In India it has been deduced from tho results of the 1921 Census that between 12,000,000 and 13,000,000 must have perished in the epidemic. Entire regions of Africa were swept clean of life, and one may only conjecture what the death toll was in tho interior of the continent, concerning which no definite information is available. In the United States, the deaths in 1918-19 were nearly i 550,000, and the total for tho five years up to 1923 750,000. The outbreak of 1922, though loss virulent, took nearly 17,000 lives in Great Britain during the first three months of the year. RUSSIA'S UNHAPPY STATE. The one country which has suffered most heavily, Soviet Russia, has felt tho scourges of war, civil war, famine, and pestilence. The first and the last Russia shared with the rest of the world. Civil war and famine have been almost peculiarly her own, Gorlerr.s, and China, iv tho course of many, after the. fall of the Hohenzolehronic internal war, have made contributions to the casualties, but there is little doubt that the 0,000,000 deaths debited to civil strife are nearly all to be allocated to tho Bolshevik revolution and the civil war that resulted: Similarly, the 0,000,000 lives taken'by famine would be almost entirely Bussinn lives, .with a small allowance for China. No one may say how many millions of the lives lost by epidemic should be directly traced to the economic collapse brought on by tho revolution and the civil wars. Between 1914 and 1924 there disappeared from the soil of what is now the Soviet Republic something like 20,000,000 people. Tho present Soviet Republic had in 1914 a population of about 150,000,----000, or roughly 10 per cent, of the world's population. But this 10 per cent, of population contributed, during the next decade, from 25 to 35 per cent, of the casualties of the entire world. It is an appalling reflection.