The herald., 1896-11-29
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FAMINE RELIEF IN INDIA


The government of India can. of
course, make no distinctions. and the
task before it. will try both it's officers
and the treasury to the utmost, all the
more, perhaps, because they can nope at
most for an imperfect and disappointing
measure of success. If the Wnole or the
distressed could be drawn to the relief
orks"-eXtemporized villages of mat
huts in which the half starved crouch
and do or do not certain moderate
stint of labor on earthworks-the work
would be easier for. although there
would be considerable mortality, espec-
tally among the aged and the women and
children, from exposure, crowding ana
inSanitary conditions, death by hunger
could be- and would be, altogether pre-
vented. but this device can never work
with complete effect There will always
be q heavy percentage WHO cannot, or
will not resort to the relief works. and to
relieve the remainder in their villages
would overtask the greatest of English
contractors.
The difficulty of actually getting sup
plies to certain great centers will,we pre-
sumo, be nearly or quite overcome, the
government and the private dealers
purchasing wheat and rice-millet, we
fear, will soon be able-all over
the world and transmitting it from the
ports by the new railways. These CEN
ters, however. will be depleted with ex
traordinary rapidity, the railways. as
the government remarks with singular
choice of words, 'diffusing the distress"
that is emptying one district as fast
as it can be filed for'the benefit of an
other. But all India does not lie along
railways and the difficulty of conveying
food to the true interior in oX-carts OF
by boats is almost incredible. The dis
tanceS are like the distance between
London and Leeds there are no light
railways, few roads, no vehicles which
can move quickly, and demand on
scale which even to the greatest COM
missariat officers would seem gigantic.
Very few people really know what it
means to convey food through country
outside the beneficent reign of Mac
Adam in oX-carts to 100000 people scat
tered through 1000 villages, the people
themselves being weak to faintness and
in many respects as helpless, or rather
as foolish, as If they We're children
1t is necessary to organize as if for
campaign, and a campaign in ten or
twelve provinces is horrid business,
more especially as the government is
bound by its duty to the taxpayer, for
whom it is trustee, to see that there is
no fraud, no combination to make it pay
exorbitant rates. and. above ALL no
waste In the midst of such a calamity
it could in England find distributors in
myriads who could be as implicitly
trusted both for honesty and energy as
the clergy, and who would all the while
be as rigid as relieving officers, but in
India it has to be careful to pick its
native agency, to keep accounts and to
believe nothing until it has been cor
roborated. Even then it is sometimes
baffied, partly by the permanent difficulty
of India, the vastness of the scale on
which everything happens, partly by the
sense of inchoate despair which that
vastness implants in all except the very
few natures which If they had to fight an
earthquake would derive fresh energy
from every successive shock.-London
Spectator.