Vermont watchman and State journal. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1836-1883, 1878-03-06
The Famine In China.

The terrible famine which is now depop-
ulating Northern China seems to far exceed
in magnitude and horror that which lately
visited British India, and is said by an Eng
glishman who recently left the country to be
"the widest spread and most fearful scourge
that has befallen humanity in the last two
hundred years." 1t began in the autumn
of 1875, and the number of sufferers is now
said to be seventy million, equal to the
united population of Great Britain and the
United States.
In the northern part of China, near the
Yellow river, or the IIoang IIo, are the four
provinces of Chilli, Shansi, Honan and
Shensi, which have been smitten as by the
last accounts, more than four million people
were wholly dependent upon the government
of China for every morsel of food they eat.
All four of the provinces have been stripped
bare of everything that can sustain life or
in the least appease the consuming gnaw-
ings of hunger. Grass, green twigs, wild
herbs, weeds, and all forms of insect and
animal life have been eagerly devoured and
exhausted. In their last terrible extremity,
the poor wretches have turned to eating
earth as the only remaining resort before
yielding up their lives. The peoples faces
are black with hunger; they are dying by
thousands upon thousands. Women and
girls and boys are openly offered for sale to
any chance wayfarer. In many cases pa
rents, being unable to dispose of their chill
dren otherwise, have killed them rather
than to witness their prolonged sufferings
Corpses lay rotting by the highway, and
there was none to bury them.
There have been famines in India during
the present century in which more than ten
millions of human lives were sacrificed.
But if it be true that seventy millions are
now threatened by this devastation in North
ern China, there is great danger that the
horrible result will eclipse any such calam-
ity of modern times. The cause of all this
misery and death was the continued failure
of crops-the failure of the clouds to distl
their customary moisture upon the parched
fields. For long, anxious months-months
fraught with life or death-no rain de.
scended as the threatened sufferers watched
and waited. The sky aboN their heads was
brass and the earth beneath their feet iron.
Failing to raise new crops, their supplies on
hand were quickly exhausted, and the re-
lief work was delayed or embarrassed, until
to millions and millions of people-men,
women and children--it will be too late, if
indeed the magnitude of the calamity would
not battle the greatest skill and the most
superhuman exertion.
Among the lessons taught by this calam-
ity there is one which bears directly upon
the folly of man in the wholesale destruc.
ton of forests. Northern China is largely
an elevated table-land. Heavy forests skirted
the mountains or their foot hills, and To
some extent in places spread out over sec
tions of the parks, as they would perhaps
call them in Colorado. The woods on these
hillsides and along the foot of the mountains
served the excellent purpose of checking the
intense radiation, thereby OBTAINING the
passing clouds and forcing them to give NJ
their contents. But vandal hands leveleC
those vast forests, denuded the country o.
trees, and now the third season has com,
and gone without bringing the needed rain
Nearly all the assistance that has beer
rendered thus far has been by foreigners
acting through missionaries, Protestant ant
Catholics. II is said that the sight of 81
much self-sacrifoing labor and Christlik'
self-forgetfulness as have been displayed b,
the missionaries throughout these trouble
has filled Cinnamon with establishment. |
has opened their eyes entirely TO the misrep
reservations of the missonarie which tn
mandarins had spread among the common
people.
The government is at last doing what i
can, by way of RENTING taxes and furnish
: ing grain but the restitution is so tota
and widespread, the supply so meagre, am
the means of transportation so utterly made
quate, that the inevitable results, both in
I mediate and remote, are most fearful 10 COT
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