THE" INDIAN FAMINE AND ITS HISTORIANS.
THE pinch of the Famine has begun in Bengal, where children are dying in Sarun ; where, in Eastern Tirhoot, one-third of the population are "dying in their villages of slow starvation ;" where the bazaars are "empty of rice ;" and where the officials, at last awake, are beginning to stand appalled at the magnitude of a danger they do not even now fully realise. Even the Viceroy telegraphs that he will not guarantee Parliament against many deaths. The pinch has not, however, begun to be felt in England, which will be seriously moved only when the death-lists begin to arrive, and when the descriptions of the famine-stricken- descriptions deprecated in advance by the writers who would rather see Bengal perish, than see it relieved in a manner not consistent with girlish sensitiveness—have begun to appear in print. Without them accounts are worthless, for the English people, with all its kindliness, is obtuse, and will hear of half-a-million dead people of all shades of copper- colour much as it would hear of a cattle-plague in the same provinces. It is time, therefore, to say a word as to the means of information which will shortly be at the dis- posal of Parliament. The first of these are the despatches from the Viceroy. Lord Northbrook is a man who certainly would have succeeded in ordinary times, and whom we see no reason whatever to accuse of hard-heartedness, but who has had very little experience of Bengal, having never, we believe, travelled a hundred miles in it : who, having no foresight, has been excessively irritated by the prescience of those who have ; who has made such preparations as he could in the commercial manner, namely, in profound secrecy, as if he were buying for a firm ; who believes orders are executed because they have been issued ; and who, to repress panic, now represents everything to the public in as couleur-de-rose an aspect as he can. His secret despatches may be full of forebodings, but his public naratives are full of cheerfulness, dwell hopefully on petty falls of rain, which, even if they were heavy, could not alter the situa- tion till September, and answer every reproach by assertions that any deficiency, which should not have occurred, is being remedied. Next will be the information from Sir George Campbell, the able, independent, but raspy Lieutenant-Governor, who is for- bidden by law from sending his opinion home direct, as the Governors of Madras and Bombay can do, but of whom the Duke of Argyll has recorded his opinion by granting him the first vacant seat in the Council of India, where, if Scotland is wise, he will be buried alive in old wool for about six weeks, emerging to give the House of Commons his frank opinion upon affairs. The next to come are the despatches of Sir Richard Temple, whose opinion is already at home (ride Monday's Times), who announces clearly that the famine is most terrible, and who allows that 1,070,000 persons are "starving" in three sub-districts alone, and that "hunger is touching all the lower classes." And lastly, come the Correspondents, whom the English people are beginning to read, one of whom four months ago gave them the first warning ineffectually, as ineffectually as he gave the first warning of the Orissa famine, where a million of people perished and the Indian Council remained silent ; while another, Mr. Forbes, is just beginning to be traduced, a third has but just begun reporting, and a fourth, who will attend to Bengal, and not Behar, is not yet in the field. Half- a-dozen more will speedily be on the spot, but for the moment we are concerned only with those who have already, we per- ceive, changed Lord Lawrence's opinion from partial disbelief into acute apprehension. The Indian correspondent of any established journal in London is usually as different a being from the ordinary " special " as it is possible to conceive. He either occupies one of those positions to which information flows of itself, all Indians having a readiness to writs, and really knows the secret history of his province, as, for in- stance, the Neapolitan correspondent of the Times did for years, or as the Calcutta correspondent of the same journal does now,—that is, he knows much more than the officials— fancy comparing the information of our Envoy at Naples with Mr. Wreford's I—or he is a channel for the ablest opinions he can procure, as Mr. Forbes, the Daily News' correspondent, now is. It is just as evident to anybody who understands anything, and is not in the Council of India, that the Times' correspondent is writing with authority, and not as the scribes, as it is that Mr. Forbes is condensing, collating, and sifting the opinions of officials, planters, and natives by the evidence of his own eyes. He travels up—we are only quoting his own statements—with Mr. Schalch, the Relief Commis- sioner selected to assuage the famine and indoctrinate him ; he has lived in Sir R. Temple's camp ; he is in con- stant communication with planters, and he is of necessity, in confidential communication with natives, whose dispo- sition is to be indifferent to suffering. His first letter shows that he was prejudiced against famine stories, that he was inclined to agree with the Calcutta gossipers, who if the North - West were in flames would deny it, lest belief should raise the price of wheat and shell-lac, and was half disposed to regard the Times' accounts, forwarded by a cool, long-headed man of high experience, and with the foible of disliking natives, as the dreamy "calculations of "a statistical nuisance." Ten days' experience altered all that, and from the moment he arrived on the spot, Mr. Forbes' telegrams have been the most alarming of all received. In one which he probably regarded as almost too full of truisms to send, he reported his inspection of a "Relief Work," of the labour-test invented to avoid the possibility that anybody not starving should have relief, unless lie submitted either to work or degradation, of the test to which Lord Northbrook declares the people are reluctant to submit, and must therefore die. Here are the Viceroy's own words :—" Great difficulty from disinclination of people to apply for relief [that is, away from home, and under villainous task-masters]; therefore, although stringent tests will be carefully avoided in the worst districts, and every means taken to supply the people with food, I cannot guarantee, in dealing with a population so numerous, and scattered over an area so large and difficult of access, that cases of starvation may not occur." Mr. Forbes found 15,000 human beings, men, women, and children gathered together, doing nothing to the purpose, paid at the rate of an anna and a half a day—the anna was clearly translated to him as a penny—or 21d. per diem, some one stopping or stealing the pay, no European supervision, and the local Treasury empty of supplies. Lord Salisbury, who sees for himself, read this, and wishing to test his best check on official smooth- nesses, smoothnesses often at direct though unconscious varia- tion with the facts, telegraphed to the Viceroy, who, know- ing at that distance as little as possible, telegraphed to Sir R. Temple, and finally answered Lord Salisbury by a state- ment confirming Mr. Forbes, in any eyes not blinded by the insane hatred of the Press which is the distinctive mark of many old Indians, in every particular but one. Mr. Forbes had confused the penny and the anna—lid. with 2-Isl.—but there had been "one had case of irregular payment,"— that is, one out of scores had been so bad that even native paupers had dared to complain ; there was no Euro- pean supervision, "for European supervision for all relief works is impossible ;" and the Treasury was empty, but would be immediately refilled. The men were receiving 21d. a day, the women and children a little less, or say, on the highest average, 2d. a day all round, or 4s. 4d. a month, Sundays in Indian public works not being working days, and rice was 24 lbs. for 2s. There is the history of an Indian relief work in a sentence. A crowd of men, women, and children all huddled together—fortunately, in this instance, only a small crowd, less than the population of Hampstead — pretending to work, spooning earth from one place where it is missed to another where it is not wanted ; with no European supervision, not even a solitary Engineer ; with native gangmasters stealing all they dare, till some planter, or doctor, or perhaps Mr. Forbes himself, complains; and paid in the power to buy 50 lbs. of rice a month, if they can get it in "bazaars empty of rice," that is, two-thirds of convict allowance—and doomed to wait on there, camped out in the open, till cholera breaks out, or till the season advances a little, and dysentery, low fever, and rheumatism thin the crowd down by the proper proportion of deaths, 200 a day. The poor wretches have not even a doctor, a chest of medicine, anything ; and half of them are leaving their families to die, as Mr. Forbes on Tuesday reports, "of slow starvation." The Viceroy has given us a perfectly truthful account. not of the relief work at Durbungah, but of the Relief Works every- where not superintended by Europeans,—melaucholy crowds, not doing anything, but forced to make a pretence, without shelter, except branches put up tent-wise, living on rice eked out by pulse, robbed ad libitum, but waiting patiently and sadly till the inevitable hour comes ; under the government of overseers who may be ordinary natives, and therefore fairly kind, but may also be those sub-overseers of public works whom the Government of Bengal has been fighting in vain for a century, who have cost us millions, and who in the Day of Judgment would steal from the angels as sentence was pro- nounced. "One bad case," says the innocent Viceroy, looking out from his windows towards three counties where fever is endemic, because the Government, unable to put up with plunder by sub-overseers any longer, destroyed the dykes of the Damoodah, and terminated the robbery and the health of the people at a blow. The simple object of all this waste of life and health and money—for the poor wretches cannot work for months after such treatment—is simply to avoid the possibility of spending a little on conveyance to the villages ; and no doubt it answers, for Mr. Forbes, whose accuracy Lord Salisbury has thus demonstrated, has moved to Duheyra, in Eastern Tirhoot, further into the interior, and ffnds "general, severe, and increasing privation among the lower classes," "about one-third of the inhabitants in each village undergoing slow starvation,"—a less painful death, bad as it is, than the slower death on the works, " and systematic relief organisation only just being commenced ;"—that is this last Sunday. How should it be commenced ? Nobody in power would believe anything, except that journalists who in India and London four months ago pointed out the certainty of everything that has occurred were fools, or worse. Nothing was done for transport off the great roads till Sir R. Temple reached the scene. "Only half the contracts," says Mr. Forbes, "are executed." And even now effort is confined to Tirhoot, *here English capital is invested, and where planters dare tell the truth, as the officials dare not, lest they should be marked as croakers. They do not forget that the Court of Directors discharged with contumely Captain Cunningham, the antiquarian and historian, for quoting papers which he had their written leave to quote as he liked, or that the Court of Directors, under the bargain of 1859, still exists under a new name ; and they are not certain that their ruler will do as Lord Dalhousie, in his scorn and loathing of such treachery, did,—discharge their victim one day, and reappoint him to higher office on the next. Tirhoot will, perhaps, be "saved," though at the cost of a death-rate which we shall never see in the Viceroy's telegrams, for it will never be reported to him ; but Tirhoot is but one county out of six famine counties and fifteen distressed counties, and contains but four and a half millions of the thirty-eight millions who, Lord Northbrook himself telegraphs, must be affected by the famine.
Whether the provision of food is adequate or not is a point on which we have no certainty, for we have no evidence as to
the price of the wheat collected by the private dealers, some 1,700 tons a day. But we do know that the purchases of rice already admitted are barely sufficient for Tirhoot, that it will take time and much money to collect more without creating famine in the producing districts, and that the Viceroy's calculations of time are wrong by fifty days. Be the next rains and the next crop what they may, new rice, if eaten within fifty days, will be as poisonous to human beings as new wheat is to cattle.
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