COUNT 'TOLBTOI AND THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.

Evening Star, Issue 8773, 14 March 1892, Page 4

COUNT 'TOLBTOI AND THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.

DAYS AMONGST STARVELINGS. Our London correspondent clips the following article on the Russian famine from the ‘ Daily Telegraph,’ to which it was directly contributed by Count Tolstoi:— “It has been impossible during the past five or six months to take up a Russian newspaper or review without being struck by the number of long letters, narratives, and loading articles which they contain describing the condition of the famine-stricken population, or appealing for aid to society and the Government, and very often reproaching both with their Indifference, procrastination, and apathy. These reproaches, I should like to state at the outset, seem to me exaggerated ; indeed, if I might venture to generalise from the facts recorded in thn Press, and those which I havo myself observed in various districts of the Government of Toola, I should say that they are utterly devoid of foundation. Not only havo I been unable to detect any traces of diiatoriness or apathy in the work of relieving the wants of the needy, but I have come to the conclusion that society and the Zemstvos have been straining every nerve to help them, and that their efforts have attained a degree of tension which admits only of relaxation, not of increase of energy.” After describing his visits to the various districts, ho says the most distress he discovered was in Ephremovsk and Epiphansk. “ One of the largo villages of the Ephremovsk district may terve as a typical instance. Out of seventy homesteads only ten were able to support themselves for a little while longer on their own corn. All the members of the other farms had devoured their last ear of corn, their last pinch of flour, and had set out with their skeleton horses to beg. The few who stayed bebiud were living on pigweed bread with an admixture of bran, which the Zemstvo was selling them for a pound. I wont into a but to inspect that bread, and I saw it and many other things besides which provoked my astonishment. “The head of the family had just received some rye from the authorities to be used for seed, but seed time was long since past, and ho had used his own corn for the purpose at the time. He was now mixing the rye with bran in the proportions of half and half, and grinding it up together, and the bread that resulted was tolerable. But, unfortunately, there was very little of it, and that little was the last. The housewife told me that her little girl had eaten some pigweed bread, which produced the twofold effect of a violent purgative and a powerful emetic, after which she had resolved to bake no more of it. The corner of the hut was filled with twigs and the excrement of cattle to be used for fuel. The women regularly scour the roads and fields in search of this malodorous substitute for wood, and steal into the forests, whence they furtively abstract bundles of twigs as long and as thick as one’s finger. The filth of the dwellings and the raggedness of the inmates were indescribable, but not exceptional. The difference in this respect between the most wretched and the most prosperous is scarcely perceptible to the naked eye. “In this village there is a colony of soldiers’ families—about ten homesteads in all—possessing no land whatever. 1 was standing opposite the last house in this row, when an emaciated woman in rags came out and began to tell me the story of her sufferings. She has five children, the eldest ten years old, two of whom were down with what I supposed to bo influenza. A child of three, in a state of high fever, was lying on the cold, damp ground of the common, about eight paces from the hovel, covered with the tattered remnants of a peasant’s zipoon or coat. When the fever left him, if ever it did, the poor child must have been seriously inconvenienced by the damp and chill; but this was infinitely better for him than to lie in that narrow, suffocating box, with its demolished stove, its dense clouds of dust, and Augean filth, in company with his four brothers and sisters. This woman’s husband had left the village to look for work or alms, and had not been heard of since his departure. She strives to support herself and her children on the crusts she gets from her charitable neighbors; but the problem grows less and less easy of solution every day, for those who live in the neighborhood can afford little or nothing, and she is obliged to walk forty versts or more to find persons who will give her bits and scraps wherewith to feed her childien, whom she meanwhile abandons to their own devices at home. She gathers all the crumbs and leavings given to her, comes home, shares them with her children, and when they are on the wane sets out again to bog for more. “ She led the same life last year and the year before; and was still worse off three years ago, because a fire broke out in her hut, and the eldest child was then but an infant. The difference for the worse in her condition then consisted in the aggravating circumstance that none of the children were old enough to look after the others daring her frequent absences. Then, however, she managed to get a little real rye bread, not the poisonons stuff which she is now compelled to eat. This woman’s condition is not by any means exceptional. There are multitudes of others just as badly off as she; and not this year only, but every year. All the families of prisoners—of whom there are legions—of drunkards, and very often the families of discharged soldiers, as well as countless mnltitndea of weak-willed peasant farmers, are suffering the same horrible death in life. Every year, whether there is a famine or abundance in the land, the wretched wives of these men prowl abont the forests, watching for an opportunity stealthily to crawl in and pilfer a little fuel to warm their famishing children, painfully conscious that if discovered committing this heinous crime they will be beaten or imprisoned. Year after year these people subsist on the charity of their

neighbors, who throw them crusts and crumbs to feed their forlorn and hungry offspring. And this harrowing state of things has always existed. It is part and parcel of our national existence. We live and thrive in the midst of it and by means of it. And the cause thereof is assuredly not the present failure of the crops,”