Show FIRST PLAGUE NOW FAMINE thousands dying throughout india the starving multitude is robbed by overseers the communicated even by insects super si lilous natives yew york june 22 robert wilber an american presbyterian mireion ary from peona india haa just arrived in new york in an interview he eald the plague ia abating in india but U e famine ie at ita height the plague lias been as bad in peona in proportion to ita eize ai in bombay where have died bat it is lessening it moves in a line like a cyclone and waa traveling northwest when I 1 left in march none 0 the people in a city through which the plaque passes will beet it unless they are in the plague belt or some one who has taken the malady carries it to another quarter it eliminated one knows how in a house in oa a wie street the conditions of the building were far mire sanitary than thousands of others A calcutta doctor who looked at it eaid well if the can in a house like that what will it do when it strikes calcutta one cause of the spread of the disease among tho natives is said to be their practice of walking barefooted bare footed even insects transmit it and a friend of mine entered a bouce where a plague patient bad died to get some of the soil for analysis the goy officials refused to let him have it deceiving Pece iving permission to disinfect it he threw come o 0 on it and afterward took up the sugar together with some ants which had collected there in his handkerchief and carried them off every one of the ants boak toak a plague microbe with it the famine is the greaf thine there this morning I 1 got a letter saving the people were dying by hundreds it is bard to know how to help them as they have no seed to eow even if rains come and their plowing oxen have died there ie plenty of grain in india but the or merchant have it stored up in hidden pits and wont beell it except at ruinous prices some have thought that a cause of plague was the putting on the market of grain twenty years old the government made a great mistake in not beginning iligir aid earlier the trouble is with llie native overseers who rob the people frightfully aney are paid in proportion to the number ot people they feed and mix earth in the grain to make their supplies po a longer way I 1 know 0 one man who got grain to distribute free and sold is at auction the people are mere skeletons living on roots and grass their doubles have bred dueer ideas ro them some cf them think queen victoria has tent the plague in revenge for the daubing of her etaine in bomby many of them to go to he segregation hoep itle because they think it is the intention of the government covern ment to put them out of the way when it gets them there in some they have actually shut up their houses with dead boding in them and be arching cartiea have been aniced to unearth the corpses the money relief offered hitherto for the distress in ludia is merely a drop in the bucket |