but has the dead bodies of the famished natives lying underneath it.'
India possesses no poor law such as is in force in Great Britain to provide for her paupers. Each family looks after its own poor; and the natives who have sufficient wealth feed others, doing it as an act of charity, which will bring them benefits in their next incarnation. In the old days the efforts of the charitable were curtailed by the want of transport. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Englishmen and Brahmins alike had the will, but there was no means of carrying it out. It was not every district that was fortunate in having men rich enough to relieve the distress in times of scarcity. This fact, combined with the transport difficulty, caused all efforts at relief to fail, and the Government began to see the necessity of taking up the matter. The result is that in the present day the duty of feeding the starving multitude is no longer borne by private individuals. A system of relief works has been inaugurated, and those who are willing to go to the centres established where water is procurable. and who are also willing to work for a daily wage, need not starve. The rice will not rot again upon the beach, for there are adequate means now of transporting the bags inland.
The natives of the south know the principal famines of their generation by certain names. The one previous to 1877 was called 'the red wind famine.' No one could say why it received that name. The famine of 1877 was 'the great famine,' so termed on account of its unusually wide extent. The famine of 1890-2, when the relief works were established all over the country, was known as 'the fat coolie famine.' The word coolie has much the same meaning as journeyman. It implies a day labourer, one who is paid by the day. The people who earned a daily wage on the relief works were coolies. They grew
