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Show 304 THE OUTLOOK Photograph from. China Famine Fund A YOUNG CHINESE MAN CARRYING HIS AGED FATHER IN SEARCH OF FOOD of disaster amounted to nearly nine million lives-the toll of famine. Since then another famine has occurred coincident with the political upheaval and the coming of the Republic-1911. Then it was that the Red Cross proposed a gigantic engineering project which would have taken some forty years to accomplish. It was never launched. So to-day we see what inaction means and what it is certain to mean unless the entire world interested in what China has to offer takes the matter in hand and helps her out of this age-long sorrow. What is seen in China is this: Normally in these five provinces there should be at least two full yields a year. Even at that, the majority of the people have barely enough to keep body and soul together. But the years since 1918 have seen not even one full harvest, and much of the seed has either been wasted through planting or has been consumed to escape starvation. With these ever-increasing and recurring floods and famines, few farmers ever succeed in raising two normal crops in five years. This last year nothing has •oeen harvested- at most one per cent of the normai-and a conservative estimate says that in consequence, forty-five million people are facing starvation. Since the coming of.winter ten to fifteen thousand of them are daily dying of hunger, cold, and typhus. Those who are on the ground claim that before the next crop can possibly be harvested in the coming June from ten to fifteen million will have succumbed, and millions of others will be reduced to a precarious state through undernourishment and exposure. To ward off starvation the millions of poor have resorted to the consumption of bark from trees. The leaves had been stripped long before the blasts, of winter had arrived. .A blade of grass no sooner makes its appearance than it is literally pounced upon by a starving Chinese, though few now have the energy to so vital a pursuit of food. The chaff of former harvests is now being mixed with roots and peanut cake (after the oil has been extracted) and with ground corn-cobs, and even potato leaves. Famine is famine, and nothing one says can add or detract from it. A great number of comparisons have been made to bring home to this world of ours the reality of the famine in China. According to a composite of estimates, between ten and fifteen million people are doomed, even with all the aid the most sanguine expect from the outer reaches of the world. The picture that has come to us dates back some weeks or months. A vast, seething multitude of weary, fearful men, women, and children are selling their few possessions at unjustly low prices-their "extra" clothing, their household utensils, the wood from the roofs of their houses, and the animal or two; selling and moving on to imaginary places of security. Children have been murdered or sold by 23 February their parents to relieve themselves of the physical and emotional burden they were upon them. Men of some vigor have left their families behind in the hope of finding work to do. What happened to the "deserted" is no conjecture. A seething world of human beings, like a beehive broken into. Most of us have at one time or another read romantic accounts of famines. Foremost among these is that of Egypt. But the picture of Jacob arriving in Egypt with his asses and the gifts of spices and fruits with which the old patriarch sought to placate Joseph makes one wonder how they and famine got along together. I have heard no such accounts of conditions in the famine area of China. For these Chinese there is no Egypt to which they can go. On the borders guards have been stationed to refuse admission to the wandering, starving hordes. Even Manchuria, which is every year a haven of promise to thousands, has been shut to them-Manchuria, which is their own land. So back from the Manchurian border press the thousands who had exhausted themselves getting there. Back to what? Back to starvation and exploitation. For some of the almost unbelievable accounts of exploitation are part and parcel of the problem of China, as of the rest of the world. Pawnbrokers have exhausted their funds in many regions buying up the odds and ends of things the poor have sold at prices next to nothing; panderers in women are buying up young girls and even wives, many of whom prefer death. Even the o'fficials are not free from taking advantage of famine to fatten their own purses. So much so that some Chinese cannot believe that any one is disinterested enough to offer aid without ulterior motives. And, indeed, there is an atom of truth in this suspicion. Can it, then, be marveled at that when Japan offered to sell half a million bushels of rice to wheat and millet eating Chinese, payment of which was to be made by way of a loan, the Chinese hesitated? One wonders further how overpopulated Japan, importing much of her rice from India and other places,, could spare so much without making the price prohibitive. To counteract these unsavory impressions, generous Japanese have raised a fund of nearly half a million yen for distribution among the sufferers. And more far-seeing Japanese, among them the proprietors of the somewhat liberal paper the "Yomiuri," are advocating whole-hearted assistance as a means of regaining the friendship of the Chinese, lost to them through the famous Twenty-one Demands and the rape of Shantung. Nothing would further good relations all around more than this, and China's sorrow might easily become a means of her rejuvenation. Many Chinese objected to the loan of any money to the present officials in China by the Powers in the Consortium. Other nations are seeing the great possibility in this method of generous aid. The British Minister to China recently |