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Updated: June 2, 2025
Of such practical problems there are two kinds: one due to the internal condition of China, and the other to its international situation. In the former class come education, democracy, the diminution of poverty, hygiene and sanitation, and the prevention of famines. Both classes of problems demand Western science. But they do not demand the adoption of the Western philosophy of life.
The staple crop of rice in its many varieties and harvests at different seasons is lucidly brought before the Government, in language which it would have been well to remember or reproduce in the subsequent avoidable famines of Orissa and North Bihar. Indigo is set before us with the skill of one who had grown and manufactured it for years.
For many will come in my name, saying, I am the Messiah; and shall deceive multitudes. And ye shall hear of wars, and rumours of wars: see that ye be not terrified: for these things must first be, but the end is not yet. For nation shall be roused up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.
Famines and floods in recent years have greatly intensified the already strong feeling of discontent and unrest, and served to pile up more fuel for the general conflagration. In short, the whole nation was like a forest of dry leaves which needed but a single fire spark to make it blaze.
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
The additional burden of a considerable foreign garrison and a crowd of rapacious officials increased the severity of the economic conditions. Scarcity was frequent. Famines were periodical. Corrupt and incapable Governors-General succeeded each other at Khartoum with bewildering rapidity. The constant changes, while they prevented the continuity of any wise policy, did not interrupt the misrule.
If it be supposed true, the only way of accounting for the difficulty, with our present knowledge of the subject, appears to be that the redundant population, necessarily occasioned by the prevalence of early marriages, must be repressed by occasional famines, and by the custom of exposing children, which, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans.
The constant wars and almost as constant famines, the general insecurity of the conditions of life, the dependence of a vast majority of the poor on capricious patrons, the hideous growth of corruption and licentiousness in the ruling classes, and the impotence of the ruled to obtain justice, above all, the servile acquiescence of religion, which should have protected them, in the political illegalities daily witnessed all these things, stirring the hearts of men, caused them to cry out against the existing order of Church discipline, and inclined them to Reform.
The ten succeeding years, however, ending with 1904 witnessed a succession of calamities that were unprecedented either in India or anywhere else on earth, with the exception of a famine that occurred in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Those ten years not only saw two of the worst famines, but repeated visitations of widespread and fatal epidemics.
Famines and sieges in fact are not infrequently followed by positive epidemics of blood-poisoning, often in exceedingly severe and fatal forms.
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