TOLL OF HUMAN LIVES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19486, 16 November 1926, Page 13

TOLL OF HUMAN LIVES.

WORLD'S TOTAL FOR 12 YEARS. SIXTY-THREE MILLION DEAD. WAR, PESTILENCE AND FAMlfc®. [FROM OCR OWN CORUESPOKTJEXr.U SAN FRANCISCO. Oct. 20. War, pestilence, famine and cataclysms of nature have taken toll of 63,000,000 human lives since tlio outbreak of the World War, says an estimate made at Washington by the assistant-director of the League of Bed Cross Societies. By i categories, the war accounted for 9,000.000, civil war for 6,000,000, famine for 6,000,000, epidemic for 40,000,000, earthquake and flood for 2,000,000. First in rank among the visitations of nature has been influenza, the secret of which is still' to be traced and mastered. It has been estimated that, between May, 1918, and March, 1919, influenza took off 25,000,000 lives, or not less than two per cent, of the entire population of the world. In India it has been deduced from the results of the 2921 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 the interior of the continent, concerning which no definite information is available. Deaths in United States. In the United States, the deaths in 1918-19 were nearly 550,000, and . the total for the five yoars up to 3923 750,000. The outbreak of 1922, though less virulent, took nearly 17,000 lives in Great Britain during the first three ' months of the year. The one country which has suffered most heavily, Soviet Russia, has felt the 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. Germany, after the fall of the Hohenzollerns, and China, in the course of chronic internal war, have , made contributions to the casualties, out there is little doubt that the 6,000,000 deaths debited to civil strife are nearly all to be allocated to the Bolshevist revolution and the civil wars that resulted. Similarly, the 6,000,000 lives taken by famine would be almost entirely Russian lives, with a small allowance for China. No one may say how many millions of the lives lost by . epidemic shouid be direcUy traced to the economic collapse brought on by the revolution and the civil ware. Between 1914 and 1924 there disappeared from the soil of what is now the Soviet Republic something liko 20,000,000 peoplo. Russia's Appalling Percentage. If the' l influenza estimates for India are correct, it would show a country with 20 per cent, of the world's population contributing the same percentages of casualties. The present Soviet Russia 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. If. is an appalling reflection.