LAND OF FAMINE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 141, 7 August 1911, Page 8

LAND OF FAMINE.

SUFFERING OF TWO MILLIONS HOPELESS CHINA.

A terrible picture of China as a land of perpetual famine is furnished by a Shanghai correspondent. The famine he speaks of affects two millions of people, and has been raging in the provinces of Kangsu and Anhwei since last autumn. The spring wheat harvest, which was eagerly looked forward to for alleviating the distress, has largely suffered from late storms. In some places nearly half the now crop has been destroyed. Thus writes the Shanghai correspondent of the “Daily News”; , “Close your eyes over the hundred miles of railway north of Nanking, the Yangtze port, and you will awake with staring, hungry faces peering into your eyes. Eyes, big and glistening, in faces of a deadly pallor, drawn by the hunger of months, seem to look through you, and something gnaws at your heart. They do not complain cr cry out, these bitterly starving people. It is the silence of their suffering stare, their meek and patient gentleness, that arc unbearable.

“The faces of two women stand out in my mind before hundreds I have seen. They were evidently sisters, and women of good birth. A crowd of a hundred or more once honest farm people, now in the most beggarly rags, are gathered in the village street before one of the foreigners of the Relief Committee, and among them arc these sisters. They keep on the edge of the crowd, but they are a part of it, for it might mean food. Mutely, neither hopefully nor despairingly, they keep their eyes on the foreigner and obediently go where the village elder bids them. Their faces are white, and seem to be fading into their groat, long-suffering eyes. It docs not seem that they could live a week, yet the distribution of rice, for which the enumeration is being taken is still ten days off. Death is stalking in every village here, over a tract of country 200 miles long and more than a hundred broad. It contains about four 'and a half millions of people, of whom the famine holds in its grip from two to throe millions. FLOOD UPON FLOOD.

“Flood upon flood has ravaged this district. The rivers in the autumn, and now again this spring, have washed over the land, destroying in some places as much as 40 per cent of the spring crops. At Lin Hwai Kuan, 90 miles north of Nanking—the junction of the railway with the Hwai River—the river is ton feet above its usual height, flooding upon the wheat; and to the north there are submerged stretches in come places, according to report, 20 miles long. “At Lin Hwai Kuan I walked along a ridge wide enough for a single line of mud houses, extending from the dry fields out to the water. In front of the first house, that nearest the good land, an old man, shivelled until one would think the spring wind might blow him to dust, was carrying in an armful of the bark of trees and their roots—not his firewood, but his food. It is not a question to the relief workers as to who is hungry and who is not, but one of deciding a race with death. The problem is which of the people can possibly last until the harvest, forty days off, without help, and which must surely die unless, help is given. This old man could last! He did not have the yellow in his skin or the pallor that warns of death’s approach. “A woman in the next hut was preparing bark for eating. ' She had boiled it ! after grinding it to a pulpy flour, so that now it was a brown, fibrous, glue-liko stuff. Every hut had a small bunch of weeds for food, water-weeds dried in the sun, looking like black excelsior. Not a kernel of grain was visible. There is a little nourishment in these weeds if mixed with some rice, hut eaten alone and constantly they bring on a swelling of the abdomen and body that results in death.

“As we got further along the ridgeway from the high lands towards the wheat fields now covered by water, the extremity of the people became more intense. The trees had been cut down and sold as firewood in a last effort to raise money—the hark having been stripped off first. Wood, always comparatively scarce in China, is this year in this district half its usual value, there being a good supply and few to purchase it. Roofs of houses here have disappeared, Die straw and reed thatch sold for food money. Typhus, which, with an in* termittent fever, prevails, was among these people. LIVING ON WEEDS. “The last dwellers on the ridge were a family of three—a father, mother, and son. Their hut was a hole in the ground, covered with a ragged part of a sail, patched with straw; their food, nothing that couud he seen; their field, the boy pointed to the water at the foot of the ridge. The father lay partly inside his hut, his head in the sun at the low en-trance-way. He was suffering from typhus. Ho did not move, not oven to open his eyes, though it had been noted abroad that the foreigner was around, and such news brings the h.opc of food. Later bo did painfully crawl to a changed position, when the bones of his back fairly protruded through the skin. He could cat the weeds no longer; ho was beyond this. “The mother was told by her wizened son—a gentle-cycd hoy of comely

face, unutterably sad—that the foreigner was before her. She was not blind, but she could not see, for her long starvation and the eating ol weeds had swollen her eyelids until closed. Her whole fare was likewise painfully puffed out. Kneeling to us she bowed her head to the ground, but said not a word; then sat cjuiotly before us as though she knew that her visible suffering was her best appeal.

“It is terribly saddening to turn away from these people without immediately helping them. The diboa (local district father) is talking to them back behind you a few yards. You can hoar him saying that yon have come to see their pitiable position, and possibly write their names on the list of those who will receive grain which may come within a week. They must not beseech you, they must not hang upon you and hold you back; for you know their misery, ho tolls them; and you can see their suffering, and will send them help if you can. Such, in China, is called ii (reason). The long endurement of the Chinese to repeated years of suffering, and their long mini's of training in the doctrines of Conlucius, have given them an iron-like power of control; and now they sink their own terrible personal distress and bow to ‘reason.’ Such reason ini our lands could not last long before rioting and pillage fire and sword.

“The cause of tiro constantly recurring famines of Anhui and Kiangsu is the silting of the rivers, which have been permitted to flow uncontrolled for centuries and have chocked their outlets, and raised the levels of the beds. The Chinese in their ignorance and lack of forethought have depleted the natural forests of the country which should hold the snows. In China science is only beginning to find a place, and the so-called paternal government is only now waking to its responsibilities. Among the missionaries and other foreigners who are forking 1 at the relief of the present famiric sufferers, there is a great plan afoot for the opening of the rivers and for otherwise controlling them, but the enterprise is so vast a project of engineering, requiring the expenditure of so much money, that it would seem the Chinese Government alone can undertake it.

“Hitherto the Chinese gentry have looked upon pestilence and famine as necessary evils of nature, designed to reduce the surplus populations; hut the present year is showing that the 'ideas of the West are at last making headway in this ancient Empire.”