than the difficulty of sustaining a crowded population from a contracted soil.
Notwithstanding all this diligence and care, however, the people in most of the provinces find a difficulty in procuring the necessaries of life; many die of actual want, and many more are obliged to emigrate: while every encouragement is given to the importation of grain, in order to relieve a needy population. The general poverty of the people has already been alluded to, in shewing them to be content with a diminished quality and sometimes quantity of food; yet many of them can hardly find food enough, and numbers die annually of sheer starvation. When a drought or inundation occurs, when locusts invade the coasts, and the crops fail from blight or mildew, imperial bounty is obliged to be extended to the sufferers; otherwise a people, considerably straitened on common occasions, would in a season of scarcity actually perish for want. For this purpose, a great quantity of grain is annually left in the various provinces, besides that which is forwarded to Peking, in order that the supply maybe ready when necessity demands it. According to one statement, there are reserved in different parts of the country about 26,000,000 bushels of grain, and 12,000,000 bushels of rice, to be sold out at a low price to the poor in seasons of scarcity; a quantity sufficiently indicative of the wants of the people, and of the straits to which they are sometimes driven, to need such a supply. And yet this royal munificence sometimes proves inadequate to the relief of the wretched; or being pillaged by underlings in its way to the necessitous, leaves the hungry to starve ere the provision reaches them. The extreme poverty of the people in the south of China is well
