Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1899 — ANOTHER INDIAN FAMINE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ANOTHER INDIAN FAMINE.

Ons-fifth of the Peninsula Suffering from Hunger. It is only three years since thousands of people were dying in India, and now about a fifth of the entire peninsula is again famine-stricken. The wide famine area extends through the interior from

northwesterly to central Punjab and embraces nearly 350.000 square miles; and though none of the most densely peopled regions is included in this territory. its population is about 30,000,000. No other part of the world suffers so terribly from famine as India. Two reasons combine to make this calamity fre-

quent and very destructive. One is that the population is so enormous as to rerquire nearly all the food produced in the country even in the best of crop years. The other is that the monsoons from the Indian ocean which .bring the rain are fickle, and when the rains fail altogether or are inadequate the irrigation ditakes are empty and the lives of millions of people are in peril. Ten million people perished in the famine of 1771 in Bengal and Behar. Slnee that greatest of historic famines twentyfive seasons of food scarcity have come to one or another part of the peninsula and the loss of life in about half of these calamities has been a million or more. A million died in the famine of 1856. The region affected in 1868 was almost identical with that which is now suffering, anil the deaths in that terrible fall and winter numbered over 4,000,000. The famine of 1877 carried off about the same number of victims, and while people were dying by tens of thousands a day, Calcutta was sending wheat to foreign lands, the famine regions being unable to pay the high price demanded for the grain. Governmental efforts on a large scale to relieve such distress as this are proofs of advancing civilisation.

DRAKENSBERG, ON THE TRANSVAAL. BORDER.