Distributing Mansion House Money.
Four great famines in India have marked the reign of Queen Victoria—each more widespread than the last, but each successively occasioning less loss of life. It was in the famine of 1868-69 that Lord Lawrence initiated, as a working principle for the Administration, a sense of personal responsibility for every life lost. In the last, that of 1896-97, the scarcity extended from the Punjab to Cape Comorin, but the skill in checking starvation was greater than in the preceding one of 1877, and the number of sufferers relieved exceeded three millions. Whilst many of India's sons gazed up at the cloudless sky with the calm desperation of fatalists, the Government and missionaries fought side by side to repel hunger and death. England subscribed £550,000 through the Mansion House Relief Fund alone. The scourge fell most heavily on the Central Provinces, and the paternal Government had not only to deal with present necessity, but to provide for the future. Our illustration is copied from a photograph of a scene in Central India. An English Government servant sits at a table covered with money from the Mansion House Fund, and he is granting fifteen rupees to a cultivator for seed rice. A crowd of applicants for similar relief surround him.
DISTRIBUTING MANSION HOUSE MONEY IN INDIA.
(Photo: Rev. A. Logsdail)