Dr. Ssmnel Cochrane of Hwsiyaso, Anhui province, a medical missionary of the Presbyterian reh, isa gradaste of Privceton University and his associate Rer. E. C. Lobenstein, a gradaste, is very well known in New York, both being of prominent families Dr. Cochran the Chinese hss elicited admiration among the medical men of America. At the request of a friend Dr. Cochrane has written the following notes on the famine, dated February 9, You asked me to write for yous statement of the causes of the famine Anhoi and of the state of affairs the: glad to do. My knowledge is of evurse the preseat time, This Lam very
atate in regard to of my home in recently been through parts of Meng: heng, Koyang, Nanbsuchow, Singpi and T'eogyang and have reason to believe that matters By this time supplies are nearly exhausted and people are daily dying of starvation in large numbers everywhere. The worst of the distress has only just begun and it must go on io a steady increase until the wheat harvest in Jane. Everywhere one goes on the streets one sees men and women, desperate with hunger, who clatch at one's clothes, re-fassing to let go and persistently follow-anyone who serins likely to give cas, They are not the well Kkoown professional beggars, though just as ragged and equalld, bat men mho have been working and would work if they only could snd whose emaciated faces and limbs and tottering gait tell the tal Besides those one ces the on streets, we know there are others rywhere in large numbers, equally hongry, unseen because staying in their homes. Through all the country in the magistracies affected are people ordinarily called well-to-d1, awaers of who now have nothing for can expect nothing until the harvest, I am not io s position to state exact are not very different in P rob chow, figures for the whole region, bat can Sichow, Wabo and the adjacent give you an ides of the large nambers magistracies in North Kisogeu. In partaiof this region, incladiog our own We are preparing to neighbourhood, we bad four bad years i to eighteen wards, The out of the Inst five and one of these was the great famine of 1906-07 Thas sll reserves of grain were exhausted. Our country is one great plain, formed by alluvial deposita from the Hosi and Yellow Rivers, These flow between flood banks which are filled nearly every sommer, The River left this part of China years sgo, bat the Huai still is menace and often overflows. The resulting flood is not in most places more than a foot or two but it kills the growing crops and bow over was not from the Linsi, but was resalte, The present flood
the resalt of tremendous downpour last August la which sixteen whole plain was covered from of the Hosi snd Ko rivers north 09} and east. The crops were destroyed and mach of the wheat harvested in June largest of these contains twelve handred families, the smallest three baodred to four hundred. They probably average eight buadred, possibly more and moat of them urgently need help. Altogether there are in them some sixty thoossnd people, But there la mach distress in at least twenty more wards, 80 we feel in our magistracy there id estimates, who To Mangcheng the distress is more widespread and Mr. Lobenstive, who has been saperinteoding relief there, aye there are tw> handred thousand in ike condition, In Nan Hevi-chow, which is more popolcas and the centre of the worst of the flood, the number is was cither swept away or rained by moold in a fow days, The inevitable bal resalt was pi at once—that a bitter famine would ensue. Daring September, October and November large nambers closed their honees and travelled sonthward in hope of fioding work, or keep-in the care of their neighbours, But the number was so large that they found insufficient means of support and in November and December drifted home again, a large namber, perhaps a third, of them baring died meanwhile of hunger and pestilence.
Daring the antamn there was atill little grain to be bad and the scanty stock was made to go as far as possible by only eating two meals of gruel a day and belpieg it out by the addition of aweer potato vines, and weeds gathered from the fields, bat starving. In Singpi things bad, though the district is ant quite #0 large. Koyang, Sichow, Wubo, are much the same, and part of Pochow was flooded also. This only accoante for Anhui; several magistracies in Kiangen are also affected. So one cannot escape the that the comber of stary nearer two million than ove and pooeibiy exoreda the former figure, To feed them for one handred days, till the harvest, woold require at least 4,000 cash or more than $3 Mexican dollars a day ($1.50 Gold). The utmost that is even thought of as possible from Chinese sources is something over a million dollars gold.
It seems too horrible to think of this vast mass of humanity left without resource and without hope to slowly aria UN
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