ARCHBISHOP VAUGHAN ON THE INDIAN FAMINE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 237, 16 November 1877, Page 13

ARCHBISHOP VAUGHAN ON THE INDIAN FAMINE.

(From the Sydney Frcemans Journal.)

It is too vast, too awful, when looked upon as a national calamity, to do much else than overwhelm the imagination. But take one Hingle individual ca*e of it and its surroundings, find your heart is pierced at once. Now allow me to present before your eyes a classical picture of such like distress, drawn by a ma>ter hand 600 years ago by one of Carlisle's heroes, who is " world-great because he is worlddeep." I refer to the poet Dante. I choose him because Carlisle tells us that Dante " seizes the very type of a thing ; presents that and nothing else." Let us look on this type, which, being a type, will present to us the real essence of what famine or starvation means, iii ptffec thirty-third canto of his " Inferno," the poet draws one of the most marvellous — to me the most affecting — of those pictures of which the " Divina Commcdia " is full. It occurred to me immediately I heard of the Indian famine ; and that picture still in my mind lent an intensity to my sympathy with the sufferers in India which I think could scarcely have been produced by anything else. I will relate it briefly. A certain Count Ugolino was shut up with his two sons and two grand-children in a tower at Pisa by his enemy, Ruggieri. The cell in which Ugolino was confined had a small grating, which let in a scanty light. There was one door at the bottom of the tower, and only one. After Ugolino had been some months in confinement, Ruggieri determined to starve him and the four boys to death. He turned the key in the door, and threw it into the Arno, aud left the prisoners to their cruel fate. Now, Dante, in his " Inferno," visits this Ugolino. Ugolino is represented as gnawing the skull of his enemy. After making some difficulty, Ugolino consents to give Dante a history of his sufferings. He says that after he had been some months in the tower with the four boj'she fell into an " evil sleep," which hid the horrid future from him for a time. He seemed to see huntsmen and lean hungry dops chasing a gnunt wolf and its whelps. At la>t the wolves seemed, to him to *>et fatigued, and they slackened pace, and as they did so he saw the sharp tusks of the dogs gore their sides. Then awakening before dawn he heard the boys weeping in their sleep and crying for bread.

At length they awoke, and the hour approached when they were accustomed to have food brought to them, but the dream made each of them have his misgivings whether they would get any food at all, and whilst thus in suspense Ugolino -heard the key turn in the lock of the door at the bottom of the tower. He knew what that noise meant. Without a word he looked fixedly on the faces of the boys ; he saya he did not weep, for he felt his heart turned to stone within him. All the children burst into tears, and little Anselra cried and said, " Tu guard i *i Padre; cite Jtai?" — " Thou lookest so, Father ; what ails thee ?" But Ugolino shed no tear ; nor did he speak a word that day or next night, till " imptteo dl raggio" a faint gleam lit up the cell through the grating, and then he says he saw his own countenance reflected in those of the four boys. " Ambo le maniper dolor ml mortl " — « I bit both my hands with anguish," says he, and the children thinking he did .it out of hunger, at once rose up and said — "Father, -wo should grieve Far less if thou wouldst eat of us ; thou gayest These weeds of miserable flesh we wear ; And do thou strip them off from us again 1"

Then not to make them sadder, Ugolino repressed his agony, and kept his spirit down. " That day and the next," he says, "we all were silent. Ah, obdurate earth, why open'dst not upon us ?" When the fourth day came Gaddo, one of the boys, flung himself outstretched at his father's feet, and cried "Padre into, yerche non, vt'aiuti?" — "O father mine, why dost thou not help me ?" and so he died. And between the fifth and the sixth day, Ungolino saw the other three fall dead one by one till, finally, he himself lost his eyesight through grief and starvation, and groped over them, and for three days called aloud for them who were dead. Then he adds, what is so terrible— " Pwcia, phi che V dvfor, pote \l dlgium" "Then fasting got the mastery of grief." Such is the type reproduced a thousand times over at this very hour amongst our Indian fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects. They require no Torre delta fame — no Tower of Famine — to be locked up in. The earth itself is locked up by the burning sun and the iron drought. And thousands on thousands of fathers and mothers and little children are being cut off by famine and disease, whilst thousands of hearts are being broken and brains maddened by the still more frightful agony of seeing loved ones sinking inch by inch into the relentless grave, where horror is breathing from the silent ground. (Cheers.) There are thousands of Ugolinos this moment in India. Let us come to their assistance ; let us help their drooping starving children. The fatherhood of God, the mastership of Christ, the providentnl order of the world, and the cry of the natural heart of every man and woman urge us to this. (Hear, hear.) Let us multiply the sentiment of compassion and of mercy. The Empire is powerful, let it be merciful too ; let us show compassion — " Sprawl it then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your Empire, that where Britain's power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy tool" (Cheers.) And in furtherance of this desire, and as one of the most practical ways of carrying it into effect, I have the honour to move — " That a fund for the relief of the sufferers be now formal, to bo called the ' Indian Famine Relief Fund.' " (Continued applause.)