The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-04-18

| the Christian Herald and sent to the central relief committee at Helsingfors | had reached seventy thousand dollars | at the time MT. Willets wrote, the amount having increased daily at the
 rate of from one to three thausand dol lars. Dr. Louis KIopsch, proprietor of the Christian Herald, has in ten years, is is noted, raised more than two mil
 lion dollars for the famine-stricken,
 regardless of nationality or creed, and
 has personally visited several lands in
 behalf of the work, notably Russia,
 Cuba and India He has thus qualified as an expert on the needs incurred by this kind of suffering and the way to
 meet them. Mir. Willets, in his letter,
 further says
 With the news of famine in Fin
 land more newspaper space was devo- ted to the Films in few days than l had been published in all the preced- | ing years. It was shown then that
 Finland was the most progressive pro-
 vince in the czar's empire, that educa- | tion was compulsory throughout the land, that religion as an institution
 was second in importance only to state institutions, that for centuries the
 Films were a people born, bred. mar
 ried and buried according to the doc itrines of Luther, abiding in the Lu-
 theran faith as to foundation of char
 acter and morals and right living, that in culture and art the Films held a place equal to that of Sweden, and
 hence that such a people were gorthy
 the help of all nations in the tie of
 their dire disttess, when especially the
 women and little children were threat ened with death by starvation.
 The chief divisions of the Finnish
 peasantry are the farmers, who are
 land owners, and the tenant farmers
 It is among the latter that the suffering
 is most acute. For two weeks we have visited the homes of tenant farmers,
 and in every case the sight of misery
 and the story of want have been the
 same. A description of our experiences
 in few of these homes, therefore, is
 thoroughly typical of all such homes
 throughout the famine areas of Fin
 land.
 recall one such home not far from
 here, where we found five children
 alone, the eldest thirteen, the youngest three. They were motherless, and for
 days had been also fatherless, for the father was away travelling about the country on skees, looking for work
 He had been gone three or four days, and upon the oldest child, a girl, de- volved the care of her four brothers and sisters. We stepped into this home of unhappy childhood, and came to a sudden pause, so appalling was the picture of misery. Imagine log hut of one room not larger than the log cabins of our own poor whites in the south, but with a ceiling too low for 1 ordinary man to stand upright, and containing absolutely nothing in the way of furniture save q rude table, few rough-hewn kitchen utensils, and a bench along one side. On that bench as we entered sat the five children. Did they evince childish curiosity at our intrusion? Nay! There they sat and stared, like so many little statues of grief. their young spirit deadened by the pang of that peculiar form of hun ger that comes of eating the same food week after week, and month after month And such food! Simply the black bread from the flour furnished | by the relief committee The bread | was as hard as pumice To soften 1t | they dipped it in hot water, making a kind of gruel. This black bread, or | committee bread. is superior to hunger ] bread, is nutritious in, a small degree, | and at the most contains no deleterious ! ingredient. But Imagine, if you can, | living for months on absolutely noth- | ing but this self-same bread These | five children had actually had subsist- 1 ed entirely on this bread since October. | On a pole over the stone fireplace were | suspended now five loaves of the com- | mittee bread, the only food in that | home, but yet forming a raft of safety l on the waters of life for the five chill | dren. Even for the three-year boy | there was no milk, for the COW had | long ago been sold. His stomach. like | those of the others, was distehded ab- normally, as the result of starvation | diet. The single room was at once | their parlor, bed chamber dining-room and kitchen. When evening came they | had no candle, not even a little petro- leum for the tiny tin lamp. So with | the coming of darkness they huddled | around the fire on the stone hearth, the | bare floor their bed, for even the straw | had been sold. By day this room was | their lay-house-though it is difficult l to associate play with a childhood that | has had glee frozen within the marrow, with childhood upon whose life | laughter has ceased as utterly as upon l the life of old age. Yet these childrei had one plaything. It lay on the win dow sill, tiny homemade rag doll, the sole evidence of childish things in i
 =-=====-==--==--==-----------=-@---