ally, two or three times in a score of years, there will occur a deficient rain-fall. This involves a scanty harvest and a pressure on the labor market, under which thousands are thrown out of employment for a period more or less protracted. They cannot be “forehanded,” by savings from six cents a day, to meet these dreadful emergencies, and the result is, if relief does not soon come, hundreds of them are liable to starve to death.
One of these fearful experiences occurred in Rohilcund during the year 1860. So decided and quick was the calamity, that before the English Government ascertained its extent, and could originate public works to arrest its severity, large numbers of the people had died of want. The poor children were the last to succumb, for nature would lead the dying father or mother, heathen though they were, to give the final morsel to the child or children, in hope of saving them. The Government hurried on the measures of relief, and also sent around its police to give immediate succor to the living and to bury the dead.
From wretched homes, where a father or a mother, or both, lay dead, the surviving children were carried out and collected together. The orphan boys were assembled in one town, and the girls in another. There were hundreds of each. The Government could extend only temporary relief, and what was to be the fate of the rescued children became a painful consideration. The pressure was too great for friends of the dead to come forward and receive the bereaved and destitute, and the poor children thus lay between hope and despair. No Mohammedan or Hindoo hand was extended to save them. There was, however, one class of persons who were ready to receive a number of the elder and most likely girls, but they knew well that their proposal would be met with indignation by the English magistrates, and that they durst not make it. They had to deal with men who understood that there was something worse for a girl than even starvation and death. So the government waited, day after day, in hope that relief for these orphans would arise from some quarter.
Amid this fearful state of things, where Christian philanthropy
