erations.

"It is difficult to express in figures with any close degree
of accuracy the loss occasioned by so widespread and severe a
visitation. But it may be roughly put in this way: The annual
agricultural product of India averages in value between two and
three hundred thousand pounds sterling. On a very cautious estimate
the production in 1899-1900 must have been at least one-quarter
if not one-third below the average. At normal prices this loss
was at least fifty million pounds sterling, or, in round numbers,
two hundred and fifty million dollars in American money. But,
in reality, the loss fell on a portion only of the continent,
and ranged from total failure of crops in certain sections to
a loss of 20 and 30 per cent of the normal crops in districts
which are not reckoned as falling within the famine tract. If to
this be added the value of several millions of cattle and other
live stock, some conception may be formed of the destruction
of property which that great drought occasioned. There have been
many great droughts in India, but there have been no others of
which such figures could have been predicated as these.

"But the most notable feature of the famine of 1900-01 was the
liberality of the public and the government. It has no parallel in
the history of the world. For weeks more than six million persons
were dependent upon the charity of the government. In 1897 the
high water mark of relief was reached in the second fortnight
of May, when there were nearly four million persons receiving
relief in British India. Taking the affected population as forty
millions, the ratio of relief was 10 per cent. In one district of
Madras and in two districts of the northwestern provinces the ratio
for some months was about 30 per cent, but these were exceptional
cases. In the most distressed districts of the central provinces
16 per cent was regarded in 1896-7 as a very high standard of
relief. Now take the figures of 1900-01. For some weeks upward
of four and a half million persons were receiving food from the
government in British India, and, reckoned on a population of
twenty-five millions, the ratio was 18 per cent, as compared
with 10 per cent of the population in 1897. In many districts
it exceeded 20 per cent. In several it exceeded 30 per cent.
In two districts it exceeded 40 per cent, and in the district
of Merwara, where famine had been present for two years, 75 per
cent of the population were dependent upo