A Scene in North Honan From Our Own Correspondent, Changtefu, Ho., March 21.
It was a great sight! Five hundred women, widows and needy, lined up at the grain depédt and getting a ration of grain that will do them for a month or more. They had been selected after personal investigation of their home conditions, and there are three times that number to receive help that will be distributed nearer their homes. How some of these 500 got home with their burden is mystery, as it was difficult for some of them to walk when empty handed, so weak and enfeebled were they.
The need intensifies. A man on his way for relief died on the roadside and was buried without ceremony. The son, returning from a vain effort to better his condition by secking employment elsewhere, heard of his father's death and also that he was the possessor of a relief ticket, disinterred the body, found the ticket and obtained the grain for himself and family.
"Chay as an Antics or Dier.
Clay has become a daily article of diet in the mountains to the west, clay mixed with a scanty amount of chaff. A sense of heaviness follows this diet, it is reported and it could not well be otherwise. This is man's extremity surely; although dirt and man are reported to consist of the same chemical elements, it is hard to understand how man can digest Reuter. and assimilate dirt into his system. These people live in a county where two Chinese, appointed by the Provincial Society for Famine Relief, have had relief in their possession for over two months and it has not yet reached the people!
Tangyanhsien to the south of this city is badly hit by famine, and it was with pleasure that we heard of the appropriation of $100,000 to this hsien, the gift of a Chinese merchant. 'This money was almost entirely invested in grain at Kirin, and if not there yet it certainly has not reached' Tangyan. The municipal soup kitchen feeds 18,000 daily.
Aid from Foreign Countries Peking, March 24, It is announced that G.$8,300,000 are being sent from America for famine relief. Of this sum the American Red Cross has contribut-G.$1,000,000. The American: Committee is sending over the remainder, which the American Advisory "Committee will. divide among the working committees in all the famine districts.—Reuter.
New York, March 1.
The General Relief Committee, Inc., which has connned its efforts. to general relief work, to-day broke a long-established rule when it issued an appeal in ce-operation with the American Committee for the China Famine Fund, askin further aid for the millions of Chinese famine_sufferers.
Mr. Charles H. Sabin, president of the Guaranty Trust Company, who is treasurer of the Committee, announced that the organization had decided to place all of its facilities behind the effort io alleviate suffering in Northern. China.
The Committee is composed of 28: prominent men and women, including the Governors of 10 states, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and General John J. Pershing.
A statement issued by the Committee said that "China cannot re~ main long in her present situation. without other nations, especially America, feeling the effects serious-
Rome, March 23.
The '"Osservatore Iomano," the official organ of the Vatican, warm-. ly appeals to all Roman Catholics. to contribute to the subscription list opened by the Congregation Propaganda for its work in con~ nexion with the famine in China. The Congregation has itself subscribed 1,000,000 and the Pope 200,000 lire.—Reuter.
NESE Mission To Faaine AREA, Tokio. March 27.
The Japanese Red Cross party for relief work in North China, whi by is composed of Drs. Hirose, Fujie, Marumo, Shimada and Miyakawa, with a secretary and apothecary, and Chief Nurse Katayawa and seven other nurses, left for Tientsin to-night. The party will leave Tuesday and will arrive on April Kobe on the Sagami Maru next for astay of three months.-——
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.