When we pass through 2 severe experience we naturally look back over the past for parallels. Unfortunately for the forefathers of these people the examples are all tog frequent. 'There has been an average of a fimino in Hsiichien every twenty years for 600 years, Four famines are recorded as due to heavy summer rains, the cause of the want hero this year. Seven are due to droughts. Nine are' merely recorded, and 17 of the floods of the Yellow River are said to have brought in a famine, In 1575, 1641, and 1833 it is said that men ato their fellows. Old men say that the price of grain fs now higher than it was in 1883. Suifering continues as grent here "as ever. Farmers buying grain fill the streets every day. Inside the East gate of Haiichien the government has appro-Hho grain is sold. eight cash per catty nated a large temple to sell rice tickets cheaper than in the market. Several thousand crowd up to buy every day. Every recatttion has to be taken lest the people injure themselves in the press. When the doors are opened a small yard is filled. Then these doors aire shut and this company is admitted to a large room where they crowd up to the high log-protected tables to have their cash counted. Then they get tickets and go out by another door, With every precaution daily accidents occur. Today for instance, during the morning, two iris were so crushed that their heads bled freely. One man's leg was broken and another was most seriously injured, Such is the mad jam to be one to save a few cash on 5 catties of rice.
These forty days till harvest seem almost an age, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, will not live to see the wheat that looks so promising now.
Speaking of the famine in North Kiangsu this year, it may be of interest to some to recall the work of the Yellow River when. it flowed through here. The records are terrible. The fickle and resistless stream often poured her muddy waters over this great plain, The history now at hand goes back with fulness to 1250 A.D. Between that date and 1860. there re 53! recorded overflows, That makes an ayarage of one overflow every 12 years. However, early in the millesinium the channel was deeper. Besides, the inconstant stream often returned, and stayed many scores of years in her mother "home." Hence it is only toward the end of her stay in the southern channel that the floods become fearlg, The serrans, that these foods brought, the want, the ruined homes, the beggared peasantry, the sickness will never be fully appreciated perhaps. The anguish caused then is somewhat alleviated to us of this generation at least by the fact that the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.