The correspondent of the Times who is investigating the- Russian
famine, declares that the only way to save the three hundred thousand German colonists settled on the Volga, is to assist them to emigrate. The villagers have lost heart- as well as their crops, their animals are dead, and in one village alone twelve hundred persons are dependent on the relief afforded by the Provincial Council of Samara.. Many of the colonists, to save fuel, are living in holes in the ground, and eat for their sole food the wild grass of the Steppe mixed with Spanish liquorice. The- prospect for the future is almost as bad, the colonists being unprovided with seed, so that in one district of Samara forty thousand acres of arable land will be left fallow. We per- ceive from other accounts that the officials are not very ready to aid the Germans, who are disliked as heretics, and whose departure would be seen without dismay. It is all very well,. however, to write easily about emigration ; but who is to move that mass of people all at once P They cannot march to a Promised Land, like the followers of Peter the Hermit ; and to carry three hundred thousand souls across Europe and to- America by sea would cost £4,000,000. A few shiploads of rough biscuit sent up the Volga would give them relief in the quickest form, but a large proportion will succumb to disease,
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