wn
upon it, and in reading some of the manuscript records of December it
is difficult to realize that the scenes of the preceding ten months have
not been hideous phantasmagoria or a long, troubled dream. On Christmas
eve, the Council in Calcutta wrote home to the Court of Directors that
the scarcity had entirely ceased, and, incredible as it may seem, that
unusual plenty had returned..... So generous had been the harvest that
the government proposed at once to lay in its military stores for the
ensuing year, and expected to obtain them at a very cheap rate."

Such sudden transitions from the depths of misery to the most exuberant
plenty are by no means rare in the history of Asia, where the various
centres of civilization are, in an economical sense, so isolated
from each other that the welfare of the population is nearly always
absolutely dependent on the irregular: and apparently capricious bounty
of nature. For the three years following the dreadful misery above
described, harvests of unprecedented abundance were gathered in. Yet how
inadequate they were to repair the fearful damage wrought by six months
of starvation, the history of the next quarter of a century too plainly
reveals. "Plenty had indeed returned," says our annalist, "but it
had returned to a silent and deserted province." The extent of the
depopulation is to our Western imaginations almost incredible. During
those six months of horror, more than TEN MILLIONS of people had
perished! It was as if the entire population of our three or four
largest States--man, woman, and child--were to be utterly swept away
between now and next August, leaving the region between the Hudson and
Lake Michigan as quiet and deathlike as the buried streets of Pompeii.
Yet the estimate is based upon most accurate and trustworthy official
returns; and Mr. Hunter may well say that "it represents an aggregate
of individual suffering which no European nation has been called upon to
contemplate within historic times."

This unparalleled calamity struck down impartially the rich and the
poor. The old, aristocratic families of Lower Bengal were irretrievably
ruined. The Rajah of Burdwan, whose possessions were so vast that,
travel as far as he would, he always slept under a roof of his own and
within his own jurisdiction, died in such indigence that his son had to
melt down the family plate and beg a loan from the government in order
to discharge his father's funeral expenses. And