THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 25, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8166, 25 June 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 25, 1906.

The famine in Russia has been overshadowed by the struggle for freedom,., But while the Russian people are striving to break the powe of the bureauoraoy 23 of the 49 provinces of European Russia, and nearly one-fifth of the population, are stricken with famine. The committee of the United Zemstvos famine relief organisation has issued an eloquent appeal to .European peoples for funds to assist the sufferers. The famine it says is doubly acute seeing that it followed so closely on a protracted war. It exceeds in intensity the record famine of 1891 and the area of suffering is larger than that of the entire territories of the

Triple Alliance. "The Russian people are starving" rune the appeal. "Do the enlightened civilisations of the West understand what that means—the starving of millions of men? Let us visit the dwelling ol a peasant In the central zone of Russia. Prom afar the unaccustomed eye is struck by£the sight of a sort of huge kennel with orooked sides all askew half buried in snow. You open the door into this izba and aie at onc« enveloped in a suffocating steam. In the dim light filtering through the frozen-up panes of the tiny window you descry an enormouß stove which occupies the best part of the small izba. It is not every izba whioh has a chimney and the smoke is creeping in sooty wreaths abv.ut the walls and oeiliug. In this space of a very few oubio feet lives at least one peasant family and very, often two or three families. Of the food there is nothing to say; the be&t of times they eat only blaok bread, washed down with a thin gruel made with a handful of grain or a few potatoes. The peasant parts with his horse last of all, and in order to Keep alive this chief instrument of his labours leaves half eaten his own scanty morsel of blaok bread. Jtiut the inevitable moment aomes at last and it oomes to many men at about the same time so that the price of the famine-stricken peasant's horse is never more than its hide will fetch." Famine is almost endemic in some Russian provinces, and in view of the exceptional severity of the present widespread shortage of food it is not surprising that the J>uma should be demanding drastic, even revolutionary, reforms in the attitude of the Government towards the peasants.