The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-02-28 00:00:00

THE BENGAL FAMINE.

The eagerness shown by all classes for in.
telligence respecting the famine in Bengal
may.well beget a thought of the helplessness
of man to prevent a calamity produced by a
disorganisation of the forces of nature. We
are as powerless now to prevent a famine as
the Egyptians were in those times of which
we read in Holy Writ, more than 3,500 years
ago. With all the mighty changes which
have come over the earth within that period,
and amid all the stupendous advances in
science and in civilisation, man is not more
able to bring a drop of rain from the heavens
at will than he was in the days when those
far off chronicles of the Old Testament were
written. In various ages and in all climes,
people have periodically suffered from a
scarcity of food. There was a famine at
Rome 436 years before the Christian era, in
which thousands of persons, in their misery
and their despair, threw themselves into the
'Tiber. A similar visitation passed over the
same city, attended by plague, in the year
262. Ten years afterwards there was a fam-
ine in Britain, in which people ate the bark
of trees. In A.D. 306 thousands died in Scot-
land from this cause, and four years after-
wards 40,000 persons perished in England
from want of food. In Italy, in the year
450, the distress was so awful that one
writer tells us of parents slaying and eating
their children. In 739 a famine prevailed
throughout the United Kingdom; in 823,
again, thousands were starved to death;
there was an awful one throughout Europe
in 1016; in England in 1087; in England
and France in 1193, leading to a pestilential
fever; in England again in 1251 ; and once
more in 1315, of so severe a character that
the people devoured the flesh of horses, dogs,
cats, and vermin. In 1335 there was one I
occasioned by long rains—the very opposite
of the cause which has now produced such a
scarcity of food in Bengal. In 1438 the dis-
tress in England was so great that bread
was made from farm roots. There was a
general famine throughout these islands in
1565; in France, in 1693 ; another in these
realms, in 1748; one which devastated Ben-
gal, in 1771; one at Cape de Verde, in which
16,000 persons perished, four years after-
wards; one grievously felt in France in 1789,
which was a moving cause of the Revolu-
tion; one severely felt in England in 1795;
slid another throughout the kingdom in
1801. In Ireland, since the opening of the
present century, famines of varying degrees
of severity have swept over the laud. This
was especially the case in 1814, in 1816, in
1820, in 1831, and lastly in 1846, through
the failure of the potato crop. Grants by
Parliament to relieve the suffering of the
people were made in the Session of 1847, the
whole amounting to ten millions sOrling.
So lately as the year 1867 thousands were
starved to death in the north-west provinces
of India. The circumstances of the famine
which now threatens to depopulate a large
part of one of our best Indian provinees,
need not be entered into at any length here.
The subject bids fair to be a painful one for
many a week to come, and the only satisfac-
tory feature about it is the energy with
which the Indian authorities are endeavour-
ing to provide food for the famished residents
in those parched and arid countries, and the
readiness shown by the British public to con-
tribute towards the relief of the hungry and
the helpless. The records of these visita-
tions, beginning with the earliest times, and
extending down even to the present day,
plainly tells us that however successful man
:nay have been in bending science to his will,
there is one thing which he cannot accomplish
—one matter wherein lie has not the slightest
•ontrol—he can exercise no influence what-
•ver over the forces of nature.