THE POSSIBLE FAMINE IN BENGAL.
THEone great fear which we entertain about the Bengal Famine is that the official imagination may not catch fire, that action may be delayed until it is too late, and that the grand difficulty of all, the difficulty of collecting actual food, may escape attention. There is a tendency in the offi- cial mind to believe that everything which is disagreeable is exaggerated, which sometimes, as in Orissa, produces the worst results, while there is a distinct resolution to keep all tasks within the limits of the possible. There is, too, a dislike to believe in private telegrams, which is natural enough, but which very often leads to the most absurd consequences, English journals very often employing agents much better accredited and much abler than the Foreign-Office employe's. What charge' d'afaires in Greece, for instance, can be compared for one instant in authority with the Times' correspondent in Greece ? or what Minister in Italy in the bad times, except Sir James Hudson, knew anything, com- pared with the quiet man whom the Neapolitan Govern- ment tried for years to suppress, punish, or if necessary kill? It is clear that some such want of imagination exists at the India Office, for though we fully believe, can indeed be cer- tain, that the Viceroy's hands have been absolutely untied, and himself left to do all he will, still we can see from the daily papers that the Duke of Argyle has not returned from Inverary to London,—an impossibility, if he fully believed that, thirty millions out of two hundred millions of Her Majesty's subjects specially entrusted to him were in danger of starvation. In India the Viceroy has de- scended from the cool and pleasant Swiss retreat, which will one day coat us the Empire, a month before his time, has broken up ceremonial arrangements of great importance, and is engaged in the hottest of cities in daily conferences with rice-dealers and all manner of disagreeable people. Even he, however, is believed to be a little over-confident, and we do not wonder at it. It is impossible to stand in Bengal, with its endless fruit-jungle and rice-fields, and believe in a coming famine in the territory which for ninety-nine years in every hundred could feed all India from its surplus. The province of Behar and the district of Rajshahye, or say, 3,000,000 of people, are, however, acknowledged on all hands to be stricken ; but there seems to be but partial realisation of the danger elsewhere, and it is carefully men- tioned, even in the Times' correspondence, that there is plenty of time, for the pinch will not seriously come till March.
And yet, in spite of all this, the danger which the Thrtes is so firmly and, we must say, conscientiously, pointing out, is real, and, moreover, is acknowledged. The sentence in the telegram of Wednesday that the reports from the districts are "despairing" means, we have every reason to believe, that as is natural, official private letters are much less guarded than public reports ; but look at that strange sentence in the very middle of the Times' telegram, so utterly unintel- ligible to the English public and so menacing to the initiated.
Food is to be provided for the minors' estates. That means that the Revenue Board, the most experienced, can- tankerous, and over-thrifty Board in Calcutta, knows that there is universal danger, and as regards the estates of which it is trustee—say, a thousand or so scattered over the length and breadth of the land—meets it with the earliest possible decision. We ask any Anglo-Indian out of office if he can conceive of the Bengal Revenue Board spending one solitary sixpence upon a precaution it did not believe to be indispensable ? And if the tenantry on these estates, which are everywhere and more kindly managed than any others, are in danger, why are the estates around them free from apprehension? Why there are three zillahs, or counties—Burdwan, Hooghly, and another—which for ten years, ever since Government broke down the dykes of the Damoodah, have been ravaged by a typhoid which never ends, and at this moment threatens to cost the State more in quinine than the dykes ever did, or even the astounding plunder for which the dykes afforded an easy pretext, and which made English Engineers long for the
Dutch system of summary retribution. Let distress, we do not say famine, strike those districts, and we may lose three millions of people in as many months. Nonsense official people will say, Hooghly is only thirty miles from Calcutta. Yes, but the county is as large as Suffolk, is almost desti- tute of roads, has twice the population of Belgium mile for mile, contains cities of which no one but the magistrate ever heard the name, one of them with 30,000 people, and is owned by the sternest Zemindars in the country. We say— and we are trying not to write sensationally—the difficulty of feeding the three Counties flooded by the Damoodah, with 21 inches of rain wanting, will be equal to the difficulty of feeding Orissa. Whence is the food to come ? Burmah, Arracan, Chittagong ? In other words, supposing every other difficulty overpassed, two millions of people are with their surplus rice to feed three, the Government bringing it all by steamers, or craft which will make a three months' business of loading, sailing, and unloading again in Calcutta, whence the Lieu- tenant-Governor must transport it in sequestrated carts, taken, as we take them in war time, over the roadless plain, into every cranny and nook of a forest Yorkshire. But there are other difficulties. Can the Duke of Argyll trust any one of these provinces ? Has he asked any single Hamburg importer whether he will give up a pound of his contract rice, say in Arracan, where it is bought up by fierce competitors, chiefly agents of Hamburg brandy-makers, till, as a missionary once said to us, the crop is raked with a small-tooth comb ? Much of the Burmese and Chittagong crop is bought up in the same way, and the ultimate reliance muskwe suspect, be placed on the non-stricken districts of Bengal,—Dacca, for example, is not mentioned yet ; and Madras. Our readers will then have only to work out the following problem :—Given an army without discipline—say of only 3,000,000 if you like, but as we believe, certainly of nine, and possibly of thirty millions—to be fed over an occupied territory, what kind of Commissariat will suffice for the work, and what amount will that Commis- sariat spend? We quite admit that the Bengalee, poor fellow ! with his slight strength and keen wit, can be fed on little, that one meal of rice a day will keep him alive after a fashion ; but his one meal does not mean the sort of quantity a cook puts in a rice pudding, but at least a pound, and what will that pound cost when it has not to be grown on his own land, but carried hundreds of miles in boats or carts seized for the occasion? Ask an army contractor what he would do it for, collection, sea transit, land transit, and distribution included, with this proviso against him, that he must not grind his rice. The threatened danger to the opium crop we think little of, that will be partly repaid in higher prices, and by an unusual crop in Malwah, but of the danger of this people, incomparably the first in India as far as brain is concerned, the only race which would give us a plebiscite, the only one which makes India solvent —the whole surplus revenue comes from their ungarrisoned districts—is matter for us all, and most of all for the officials. We believe they will do their duty fully, but they will do it all the more fully if England seems to care for and under- stand their toil. This is no case for Lord Mayors' meetings, and demonstrations of that kind, even if followed by a large subscription. Bengal wants no alms, any more than Holland does, but she does want the steady, persistent demand of the English public and of Parliament that the Indian Govern- ment shall keep these people alive, if they have to ask for a loan to do it. If the City is in a charitable fit, and wants to do something, let it telegraph for a message of a thousand words each from three of the greatest exporting houses in Calcutta, and so inform itself of the probable business facts.
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