The Providence news. (Providence [R.I.]) 1891-1906, 1893-10-13
A II OF DISTRESS.

A CkY Vi. DISTRESS.
Ont from Georgia comes a feeble cry
of distress and a piteous appeal for aid
that must not fall upon ears that will
not hear. Brunswick. Ga, Is in the
most dire need. Five thousand human
beings are confined there by a shotgun
quarantine. in a plague stricken city,
without supplies either of food, cloth
ing or medicine. and with no hope Of
checking the awful ravages Of disease
until a frost comes.
Those who are well today know that
they are doomed to sickness and perhaps
to death. If not today, tomorrow. and
it not tomorrow next week. There is
no escape. The scenes daily enacted
around the commissary are heartrend-
ing and indescribably pathetic.
Women and children crying
for bread. their empty baskets
hanging lightly on their emaciated
arms. while their eyes in mute and
agonized appeal look at the row of
empty shelves in the commissary, and
fill with tears Of despair, OF burn with
the brightness that marks the approach
Of the fever that no aid can check.
Distress, poverty and hopelessness
show in the faces of the people. There
is not a dollar in the city treasury,
three banks are broken, business is
entirely suspended and by land and sea
every door is closed against an helpless
people. "Are our people to be allowed
to die like dogs in the gutter" is the cry
of a noble minister to a civilized world,
'their bones devoid OF flesh from hun
ger, literally rotting in their wasting
bodies? Is there not a God above us to
awaken the world to our wantsY"
For three days rations are served out
n quarter of a pound of bacon,
one quart OF -four and three quarts OF
meal. For the sick and the dying there
are no ~delicacies, no tempting dishes
to restore vitality to the shrunken and
fever-stricken bodies. Mothers stand
helpless when their little ones cry for
bread, and hearts are breaking because
they a give no aid to the dear ones
Frustrated on beds of suffering.
They rarely have q frost before the
Goth of November and so forty days
must pass at the earliest before relief
can come. The number who need food
in the city and country included in the
Gordon OF quarantine numbers approx
mately ten thousand, and it is now
reasonably certain that the disease will
take in the entire population before the
frost comes.
Think Of it, people of Providence, as
You sit at your tea tables tonight and
look around your well-provided boards.
Think Of 1t, fathers and mothers, as you
listen to your little ones when they lisp
their evening prayers tonight. Think
Of the fathers and mothers in the
quarantined city Of Brunswick, listen
ing instead TO the cries of distress
and the piteous appeals for food that the
hseio ~hi'uAch VI DIuuSWlCh mluke 10
them. Can You listen to such a cry and
not respond? Food, clothing, money is
needed. What IL your little ones were
sick, hungry and dying, and you could
give them no aid? Would it not seem
to you that man had forsaken and God
forgotten you? The half-starved
mother Of Brunswick, giving to her
babe at her breast that which is supply
ing her very life because Of the lack of
nourishment, calls upon You to hear her
prayers and out OF your abundance to
send but a trife to relieve her distress.
Not only famine. but the gaunt aud
spectral hand Of disease is stretched
over every home, clutching mt the in
mates and laughing at the harvest of
death.
And this In America, where in A.
hours the distress could be removed, the
hungry fed, the sick furnished with
proper medicines-and We claim 10 be a
christian nation.
When. after the days Of that terrible
civil war in which we contributed freely
the lives Of our fathers, O n ara
brothers to uphold the raion, we gave