Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · February 11, 1868

Famine in Europe.

The governments of Europe have an enemy to contend with that cannot be overcome by needle-guns or Chassepots. The reports of destitution there are most distressing. From Sweden to Algiers, and from England to Crete, there is hardly a country in which there is not fear of famine. In the barren districts of Sweden and Norway where, when the crops fail, there is little left but ice and trees, the people are subsisting on cakes made from birch-bark. Across the Baltic, throughout East Prussia, the destitution is so great that the hunger-typhus has broken out. Our German exchanges contain full accounts of the ravages of hunger in the eastern provinces of Prussia.

A correspondent of the Stettiner Zeitung, writing from one of the districts on the Baltic, says: “Young able-bodied men and women, with their crying infants wrapped in cloth and bound to their bodies, wander about from village to village, seeking bread or work.

They hardly can find bread for their own needs, to say nothing of their aged and feeble parents at home. The peasant-farmer has nothing to give, and locks the gates of his yard against them. The large proprietors themselves have little left to give, and two-thirds of the winter is yet before us.” A correspondent of the St. Louis Westliche Post says that the hunger-typhus has broken out in Gumbinnen, and is threatening even to appear in the western provinces at Strasbourg. The cause is attributed to the bad crops and the wet season of last year. The whole of Eastern Prussia is nothing but a low, sandy plain, Berlin itself being built to a great extent on piles.

While the facts are indisputable, public and private charity have been very slow to come to the relief of the sufferers. The official organs of the government sought at first to conceal the fact, and pronounced the reports of destitution a “democratic exaggeration.” But the government has at last come feebly to the rescue. The Crown Prince has placed himself at the head of a committee of relief to which Prince Albrecht of the royal family has contributed the enormous sum of twenty-five thalers. The Queen is organizing private charity among the ladies. Wheat is expected to arrive from Hungary and the coasts of the Black Sea. But there is reason to fear that the government has been too slow.

Crossing the Rhine, and passing over the fertile districts of Alsace, we find hunger and destitution in almost every part of France. A change in the fashion, which has diminished the demand for the kind of silks manufactured at Lyons (in connection with the uncertainty of the political future), has paralyzed the manufacturing industry of that city. The operatives of the Faubourg Saint Antoine besiege the doors of the Hotel de Ville, at Paris, for bread or work, so that around the square where so much blood has been shed, and where, for slighter causes, revolutions have commenced, the guards have been doubled. From Nantes, Rouen and Roubaix, the great manufacturing district of France, comes the same story. At Lille starvation is epidemic, and even in Bordeaux, where the rigors of winter were unknown, suffering is very great. Beyond the Mediterranean, in Algiers, where the drought of two years ago has been followed by the plague of Egypt, the grasshoppers, the Arabs are living upon grass and leaves, and may be seen, naked and emaciated, quarreling with their feeble strength over the offal at the opening of the sewers. Every morning in one of the seaport towns a dozen corpses are found in the streets, and little children, clinging to their dead mothers, are rescued by humane hands. Some mothers, even, whom the pangs of hunger have made mad, offer their infants in the streets for sale for a few cents. One hundred thousand souls have perished in six months from famine. And while Napoleon asks 400,000 francs for the relief of this colony he is negotiating a loan of 440,000,000 francs to create an army which shall embrace in its ranks every able-bodied man in France.

In England the suffering seems even greater than in France. In that vast “East of London,” which embraces a population of 600,000, there are 40,000 persons dependent upon charity, and 60,000 in actual distress whose pride conceals their condition. The deaths greatly exceed the ordinary rate. The poor law is inadequate to meet the requirements. The poor rates have been very much increased, and in one district of 11,000 souls, who legally should pay the poor rate, it was found that 4,000 were in need of relief themselves. Where the defaulters were formerly hundreds they are now thousands, and when an officer gets out a warrant to distrain he finds nothing but pawnbrokers' tickets; while ill-organized public and private charity, according to the London Times, “is actually increasing the amount of pauperism and demoralizing the district.”

The condition of things is very gloomy, and contrasts strangely with the increase of the military establishments and the general preparations for war on the continent.