11. Q. How many people homeless, or without food, or both? A. (a) Able-bodied men, 58,966.
(b) Women and children, 69,379.
(J) Old people and incapables, 30,480.
(d) Really starving, 126,690; (e) Dead from hunger, 26.
These figures embarrass me. cause they present anomalies, at: any rate in the matter of detail. When one makes an inquiry in a very restricted space of time, over such a big stretch of country, one can but pick up, as one hurries through, the information given by others, my helpers themselves being of different opinions as to the exact meaning of the questionnaire. But when one must afterwards bring; the figures together into one table, the anomalies strike the eye. One finds it curious for example, that in certain places, there are fewer women, child-j ren and invalids, put together! than able-bodied men! In the same way, an the west of the! sub-prefecture, it seems that they} have counted the number of starve ing included in a period more or less continuous, whilst in the east they only speak of the present the first figures (able-bodied men) famine. However it may be with'
from the point of view of the famine, if one adds the two follow-: ing sets, (women and children, and old men and invalids), one obtains) the total of 158,827, that is to say, more than one-third of the total) population of Yotsing, which consists of 448,381 souls. according to! the last official census I do not} think that this number is at all ex-; aggerated.
The figures of the' famine-stricken will amount, in my bumble opinion, before the next harvest, to more than half the population. I wish I might be mistaken. But I have brought back from my tour a feeling of dismay, with a conviction that if we do not come to their assistance, these poor people, as they keep saying, will really die of hunger in the coming year.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.