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The bank sustained the inhabitants of the village through severe famines during two consecutive winters, and its capital in 1867 amounted to 300,000 dried fish, and was accumulating at the rate of 20,000 a year.
People starve when trekking vast distances through wastelands without food to eat, they starved in concentration camps, buried in mind disasters, they starve during famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.
The causes that would lead to an increase of famines in India were fully pointed out by me in 1871 in the "Experiences of a Planter," in letters to the "Times," and in the evidence I gave when examined by the India Finance Committee of the House of Commons in 1872.
This spirit, so charmingly expressed, was never quite absent from the monkish orders. The monasteries were asylums for the hungry during famines, and the sick during plagues. They served as hotels where the traveler found a cordial welcome, comfortable shelter and plain food. If he needed medical aid, his wants were supplied.
But the nourishment of dead leaves soon became unbearable, and likewise did the sap-wood, or second rind of young trees, such as elders and aspen trees, which they beat to a pulp between stones, have to be given up. At the time of the two previous famines, some wretched people were said to have supported themselves with a kind of fattish clay. Not far from Yvon's hut was a vein of such clay.
But is there in Nature the same constant tendency to these earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and famines by which so many myriads, if not millions, are overwhelmed or reduced at once to ruin? No; these awful events are strange exceptions to the ordinary course of things; their visitations are partial, and they occur at distant intervals of time.
But there came a day when messengers from far off lands came over sea a great journey to the temple. And to Eline they told the despair and want and the madness of unbrotherliness that men knew in the countries whence they came, countries where the light shone no longer. Of wars and of famines they spoke, of poverty, oppression, and crime.
Since the time of Christ there have been two similar famines recorded, one in the eleventh century, lasting, like Joseph's, seven years; and the other in the twelfth century, of which the most distressing details are given, even to the extreme desperation of cannibalism. The same cause originated both, the failure of the Nile overflow.
The turn of the latter is now come; famines are becoming terribly frequent, and mankind is pouring into the virgin fields of America. Lower Georgia, the Carolinas and Eastern Virginia have all the characteristics of these starved and worn-out lands.
Thou hast thy monthly bills, Thy plagues, thy famines, thy physicians, yet tick, Like the death-watch, within our ears the ills Past, present, and to come; but all may yield To the true portrait of one battlefield." There was a small clearing on the battlefield called the "Peach Orchard" field. It was of irregular shape, and about fifteen or twenty acres in extent, as I remember.
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