Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1872-07-15
A FAMISHED PEOPLE.

1t is pitiful story that came by Ca
bic last week that the famine in Persia
is still as bad as ever. A liberal hand
ought to be stretched from the gra-
naries of our productive land for the re-
lief of these starving people. A writer
in lions Herald gives graphic picture
of the horrors of such an Eastern famine
as is raging in Persia to-day:
The details of such terrible vista
ton are beyond human sketching. Food
becomes scarce and costly. The poor
have no longer money with which to
procure it. Brass and iron pots are
sold, earthen ones alone being retained;
doors and window frames are removed
and sold for food, which is doled out in
mouthfuls to the household. The play of
children ceases at the hearth, the noise
of JOY is hushed in the village Every
thing is sold for grain the bark of
trees, pieces of old leather, fruits, and
roots. are all consumed. Now fathers
barter their children, and wives aban-
don their husbands for bread the vii
lage is deserted, and the roads lined
with men and children flying for relief
Wasted to shadows, worn out with anx-
iety, they totter along, or fall on the
highway. Skeleton dogs gnaw the skin
from skeleton men ere they are dead, in
full sight of crowds too stolid, too indif-
ferent, too weak, or too near death them.
selves to do ought to interfere with the
carnival. Pestilence follows in the train,
and the stencil from acres on acres of
unburied bodies, attracts the vulture
and the jackal. All animated life soon
shares the calamity the cattle are dead
or dying; the very fish perish in the
beds of the shrunken rivers, and the of
fetal report of the famine in Marwar,
made to the British Government, now
lying. before me, says, not only the deer
and the jackal, but the very feld-rats
die of starvation. Agriculture, the
arts, trade, manufactures-all avocations
are abandoned. Labor is paralyzed.
Seed for future crops is Improbable,
and the few survivors are without ambi-
ton, as they are without solace. In
their generation they will never be any
thing but poverty-smitten toilers, and
the Inheritance of their children must
be only one remove from their own des-
olation
| 1t is frightful to hear the yet more
graphic picture which our missionaries
sometimes depict of isolated instances
of poor wretches sitting on their skeleton
launches, craunching blue mari, which,
with both hands they are barely able to
hold to their wasted jaws of carts
crowded with skeleton children crawl
ing over their fellows dead in the same
vehicle; of the brute force which was
necessary, in making a tolerably equal
distribution of few grains of food to
Infatuated masses of men, women, and
children, and of much beside from which
the very steel of ones pen shrinks. Oh,
it is terrific We would that something
might be done for Persia in this hour of
desolation. She has been bitter against
our Christian faith. She has given in
spiration to all efforts to destroy Chris
tianity in Asia but just because of all
this have we the greater opportunity to
exhibit Christian magnanimity and char
ity. We ought to arm our missionaries
with this additional manifestation of
our Christian sympathies In all con-
ficts, present OF future, with the hordes
of the green banner, Mussulmen preju-
dice and bigotry ought to be stormed by
the recollection of the heart care of
American, as we'll as British Christian
ity.