Short Crops in Europe

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 9, 1875

Short Crops in Europe.

The London Morning Post, of Oct. 23, has a Berlin dispatch of the 22d, saying the depression of trade is felt so keenly by the industrial classes that the government has been requested, as a means of preventing acute distress, to resort to the measure successfully adopted in the last two wars, the establishment of loan banks. The government has not as yet shown much inclination to accede to the request. Serious distress is anticipated among the industrial working classes during the coming winter, and apprehensions are entertained of a crisis in financial circles.

The same paper also says: “Russian correspondents to German newspapers give distressing accounts of the unparalleled failure of this year’s harvest. Never before, it is asserted, has a failure been so general in Russia, both in geographical extent and in comprehensiveness, with regard to the crops affected. Russians are still familiar with the distress resulting from failing crops, by their experience of the Samara famine. That, however, was merely a local famine. The present is general. The entire cultivated zone is deprived of its expected harvest. From Arol to the Crimea, and from Tambow to Podolask, it is the same tale, and there is no prospect of help, for there is no one to help—all are groaning under the same load. In other years, if there is a failure of crops, it attacks only one species, be it cereals, or roots, or grass. But this year all crops have suffered alike.”

No abatement of the floods in England is reported. Thirteen persons perished at Nottingham, and six at Burton-on-Trent. Fifty-five persons lost their lives in one week by shipwrecks on the eastern coast of Scotland.