The States and Union. [volume] (Ashland, Ohio) 1868-1872, 1871-11-29
The Persian Famine,

showing itself in noble fruits, is activ,
enough. Nay, as we have recently
seen, abstract woes and misfortune:
sometimes stir the ready Christian
I heart, for did not, the other day, learn
ed and pious men cross the Atlantic
and go to st. Petersburg, or som,
point in that neighborhood, to inter-
cede for the Livonians and Baltic Pro
~testants, who are denied certain relig-
ious privileges, though otherwise com
Portable enough. That their mission
wholly failed, and that they were
snubbed by Prince GortschakoH, doe;
not detract from the merit of theil
emotions. Conceding all this, how
few are they who, boasting that amcng
men, such as we are, nothing that
concerns humanity is foreign, know
of the misery which, at this moment,
is resting on a distant part of the
worlds surface, beyond the Christian
circle? That great tract of classic
land, extending from the mouth of the
Indus to the limits of Arabia, and up
to the mysterious ridge which Ararat
dominates, where were Pcrsipolis and
Sileucia, whence the millions of Xer-
xes marched, and which Alexander
conquered. and Artaxerxes restored,
and for which Sapor struggled to save
the home of Zeroaster and the Magi
is at this moment desolated by a
famine, the like of which the modern
world has never known. There have
been famincs before in Northern In
dia, and in other regions, which, de
nuded of trees that shelter springs,
depend wholly on artificial irrigation,
but none, in spite of all statements to
the contrary, like this. 1t is a famine
Of forage as we'll as of cereals-a fam
inc which strikes down the beast of
burthen so that distant supplies are
unavailable. "Words," says q recent
writer, familiar with the subject and
the country, "will not suffice to de-
scribe the extent of a calamity which,
if it last another year-an6 the time
has passed for rain-must blot Persia
out of the nations" Sir Henry Raw
%linson, measuring his words with the
precision with which trained scholars
always speak, says: persia is a doom
ed country Even the Bedouin tribes
of the South, whose migrating habits,
one would think, might enable them
to flee the wrath which has come, are
powerless to save themselves. The
writer, from whom we have quoted,
says:
"The clans cannot march to more
fertile pastures, for the drought has
desolated the whole pastoral country,
and if they wander beyond it they
will be treated like enemies, even if
there exist means to feed them beyond
the frontier. Their means of locomo.
tion-that is, of travelling hundreds Of
miles through dried up ptains-must
nave filled them, and the only course
will be to practice the resignation,
which in extreme moments never fails
a Mahometan, to live on less than will
keep them alive, and await calmly
either relief or DEATH"
And then, as if to make the picture
more CHASTITY still, the writer adds:
Help, if it comes ut ell; must come
without, and that help, humanely
speaking, nearly impossible" There
are no roads, no rivers, no mean of
transporting Of food, and un
like India, under provident Christian
government, no reserved supplies. ga
Persian encampment," says another
traveller in that land, "with its horses
dead must be like an encampment in
a ruined planet, isolated from the help
of all sentient beings" In one city
of Persia, out of twelve thousand in
habitants, but two survive.
The only possible hope, and this a
faint one. is from contcrminous Brit
ish India, and how poor reliance that
is manifest from an extract from a
leading London journal by no means
unfriendly to the Gladstone govern
ment, least Of all to the Secretary for
India:
1t is the duty to save the Persian
Bedouins, it is on the Duke of Argyle
and the Council of India, and not on
the Londoners, that the moral re-
sp~onsibility must rest. They can do
the work if they choose, and nobody
else can. If the Duke pleases to or
der the effort and the Council to sane
ton the expenditure, they can throw
limitless stores of tool and sufficient
commissariat officers and carts into
Bushire t O save the lives of all the
Bedouins in the South who can move
all !; can rescue fifty or FIVE hundred
times the number of persons who can
be saved by any other organization.
That, as we say, they can do it is GER
tain; but the attempt involves a Sc
effort, and, after much thinking,
cannot be certain as to the moral
The Indian Government
cannot take upon itself the woes OF all
Asia.
Grateful as we may be, among our
minor miseries of misgovernment, that
distance releaves US from the necessi-
~, or even the possibility of stretch
ing a hand of relief to these poor Pa
we cannot but hope that the
great English speaking or English
governed principality of the East, in
spite of all these auguries, will be able
do something. and much. And
who is there to say whether, in the
providence of God, it may not be that
his desolation and this intervention
will De the means of opening the great
INSTRUMENTATION by the
1alley of the Euphrates, which time
,ut of mind has been the great desid-
of English and Turkish engin-
We have lived to see the
Mediterranean pouredinto the Red Sea,
railway completed through the
of Caucasus, may, with no
very great span of life, read of a Min
Station ON the banks of the II