A CRY FROM RUSSIA.

Colonist, Volume XLVIII, Issue 11976, 11 July 1906, Page 4

A CRY FROM RUSSIA.

FAMINE AND STARVATION, While the Russian people are striving to break tbe power of the bureaucracy, twenty-three of the fortj nine provinces of Eurpean Russia, and nearly one fifth of the population, are stricken with fwnine. Of what famine means to the moujik we can form some idea from reading the impassioned appeal for help whioh the Relief Committee of tbe United Zemstros have sent to the London Press. The British public is given a horrible picture of the

Su arving peasant's hat, a sort of ■ ?uge kennel, all askew, half buried | J n the snow, the windows covered * with piled up manure to keep out the cold, the straw roof half torn away to feed the stove or the cattle. When the door is opened the visitor is enveloped in a suffocating steam, and assailed by an abominable stench.^ The best part of the tiny room is occupied by a large stove, and perhaps the hut'has no chimney, and the smoke creeps about the walls and ceiling. In this space of a very few cubic feet live one family, and very often two or three families, with calves, lambs, and pigs, all these living creatures herding together for the warmth of their bodies. There is hardly any fuel to burn, often nothing better than manure, which should go to the fields. And outside a blizzard is raging, with the temperature at 45 degrees of frost Fahrenheit. "Of the food there is nothing to say : at the best of times they eat only black bread washed down with a thin gruel made with a handful of grain or a few potatoes. Meat is a luxury which the peasants cannot afford more than two or three times in the course of the year. But when famine comes upon the district their sufferings are too terrible for words. • Statistics show that in famine years the peasants lose 71 per cent of their cows and smaller farm stock. Epidemics spreadj apace; the so-called ■ hunger-typus, scarlatina, diphtheria. ' The death rate becomes 'appalling, while 1 those that remain alive are ■ weaklings all their days. There is I no milk for the babies, the sight of . whose pale, consumptive faces, and limbs no thicker than a Jjknotted whip-lash, sends a shudder through the frame of the unaccustomed visitor." The peasant parts last of all with his horse, and in order t o keep it alive he gives up half his scanty supply of black bread. But sometimes be waits too long and cannot sell it at any price, and then h'6 has to kill with his own hand his last hope of making a livelihood. "Who shall say that this bitter blow of the knife has not more force in ] driving the peasant to rebellion than all the arguments of the professional agitator i