feb. 3. is a common saying that a sting can only give out a certain amount of sound however hard it be struck. Since the beginning of the Great War mankind has) been so overwhelmed with horrid ble things that former conceptions of the value of human life have utterly gone and therewith the sense of indi and respective responsibility has to a great extent been stunned. To this and to the violent reaction arising from the Armistice are attributable the jazzing, extravagence, infidelities, divorces and} intolerance of all restraint and discipline which have latterly been so conspicuous. The same sort of excess was seen in Directive days a century ago, as doubtless in every period immediately following a world upheaval. We are not trying to exonerate ourselves or anybody else, but it is permissible to think that in such crises mankind cannot be judged by the same standards that reassert themselves after several years of peace. But already there ave signs of a respite from the wildness of the past four years. Vaint evidences of normality are reappearing like gleams of sunshine beyond the ragged edge of a great tempest, a feeling also that we have all had enough of pleasure-making.
Tt is difficult to write of the subject which prompts this article without appearing to preach, for which few have any justification and of which if we seem to be guilty we ask our readers' forgiveness. But it is impossible not to feel that some new way of thinking about the terrible famines and distress from which hardly one country of the articulate world is free is needed both: by individuals and nations. We publish to-day a statement by the China International Famine Relief Commission, which describes how eight provinces have been smitten by flood or drought, and 15,000,000 people are destitute. Tu one district a foreign witness actually testifies to cannibalism. The Commission's statement is but a repetition of many reports) by our outport correspondents, one of whom recently described ai town in this province where the water still stands three and four) feet deep, relic of last year's) floods yet undrained. From
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.