We distrust the stories now being published of the reduc-
tion of population caused in Western India by the famine. There is no doubt that in the Central Provinces, and in some Native Staten, a vast number of people, mostly from the residuum, have died of want and the diseases produced by want, but the figures given are wholly untrustworthy. The census-takers cannot distinguish between those who are dead and those who have fled. Indians never abandon their villages while they can help it, but if visited by famine or unbearably overtaxed they will emigrate wholesale, and distribute them- selves in the nearest districts not so visited. Bundelcund was once depopulated in this way. The capacity of a populous Indian district to absorb waifs and strays by scores of thousands has often been remarked by perplexed officials, the truth being, we fancy, that the positive immigration may be large yet the percentage be small. London would take in a couple of hundred thousand visitors for a short time and not know of their arrival. The misfortune has been a terrible one, but the Indian Government has done its very best, stretching its authority in the Native States, for example, to breaking point; it has fed people by the hundred thousand, and if the monsoon rains will but fall there will soon be but one trace of the famine left,—a curious scarcity of child voices in the villages. The heaviest weight of the calamity falls on the little ones.
