[Growing Anxiety and Despair A famine relief worker sends us the following picture of conditions on the banks of the Han River For a thousand miles the Han River takes its tortuous course down from the mountains to_ its junction with the Yangtze at Hankow, and in the 300 or more miles with which we are directly concerned it has broken its banks in some dozen places.
The country behind the dykes was devastated, the houses of hundreds of thousands destroyed, with the loss of many, many lives, and then the river, like an angry snake, coiled hack upon itself, leaving behind desolation and despair.
The dykes are still down, the flood is again rising, and the poor farmers, clustering in mat hovels on the tops of the dykes, are watching it with hopeless faces, seeing in a month or six weeks the coming of the rainy season and its high floods, which will bury their scanty crops beyond hope of any recovery.
We are using the Famine Relief funds and the labour of those, thousands of farmers whose lands are already flooded, to throw a barier of earth across the path of the rising tide, and the anxiety with chieh we regard the rising of the river, inch by inch, and foot by foot, can be understood.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.