The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1879-03-06

disease resulting from famine. 1t was
not until this terrible restitution and
desolation had been progressing more
than year that the Government was
able to afford even precarious and alto
gether insufficient relief. The famine
stricken country was shut in by mount
aims, and the rivers and streams were
not navigable. 1t was deficient of rail-
roads, and, when the cattle died, there
was no means of transportation for
either persons or food.
Hardly had the Government been
able to afford food and shelter to those
who had been able to crowd to the
larger towns, when, as an almost
natural result of the restitution, filth
and wretchedness, the smallpox made
its appearance. Vaccination had never
been practiced, and the scourge fol-
lowed hard upon the famine. Yellow
fever and cholera had their share, but
the smallpox asserted supremacy.
At the Town of Fortalez there were
$50, 900 refugees. Here the pestilence
ragged for several months, and in De-
cember last the number of deaths
reached 1000 a day. Twenty-one
thousand persons died in December.
At other places the mortality was pro-
portionately as great. There was no
sanitary attempts to avert the mortality
or to limit it. 1t was allowed to wear
itself out. The dead were buried in
trenches, thinly coveredwith sand, and
now the Black Plague is consuming
those who escaped the famine, the yell
Loo n1 n~A <l,n
No one can read this terrible story
without being impressed with the inn
portance of Communication as means
Of averting such calamities. The great
famine which has ragged so long in
China has been prolonged by the i'm
possibility of transporting food to the
afflicted districts. There being no
railroads and no navigable streams,
and the country being remote and
hemmed in with mountain ranges, and
populous, famine is unlimited in its
devastation. The want and misery
produced by famine are of course fol-
lowed by epidemics which sweep the
people away remorselessly. All relief
from beyond is shut out. In India the
British Government has been able to
do much to mitigate the horrors OF
successive famines, but it is due to the
facilities offered by railroads that re-
lief has been extended to the suffering
people. The interior districts of Bra
iii are populated by an ignorant, i'm.
provident people. Shut out practically
from the rest of the world, they know
nothing and care less for any improve.
ment in their mode of living; they know
nothing of precautions against calam.
ity. They probably never heard OF
sanitary regulations, and have no de-
sire for commercial intercourse with
people beyond their own tribes. Wher
pestilence falls upon them they perish
by the wholesale. For two years they
have been dying of starvation. and ne
word of it reached the outer world.
If the States of this country west o.
the Mississippi were peopled as thickly
as thew are now, and had no navigablt
streams, and were dependent on thu
food produced by themselves for lif'
from one season to another, failure o
crops or grasshopper visitation woul<
reduce them to famine and all forms o
pestilence, especially if relief was onl.
to be obtained from the Atlantic port
and hauled overland. A railroad run
ming through these interior Province
of Brazil would furnish a promp
means of relief to the regions expose.
to these failures of food products. and
by averting the famine, arresting tn
terrible mortality from starvation
would have also averted the variou
forms of pestilence which followed tn
| drought and the starvation.