Lancaster Daily Intelligencer

Famine In Newfoundland

Fearful Suffering And Unusual Efforts To Raise Relief.

Boston, Feb. 14.—A St. Johns despatch says that the difficulties and commercial depression in Newfoundland are more serious than has been supposed. News from the northern part of the island is of the most alarming character. Thousands of barrels of flour and other supplies sent north by the last steamer are wholly inadequate. The ports are now frozen in and it is impossible to get supplies there in time to save the people from starving. It was a most pitiful sight to witness the crowds of people who had walked 20 to 50 miles over barren rocks and wastes to where the steamer stopped, in hopes of getting supplies of molasses and pork enough to keep body and soul together during the next three months. But the steamer had no supplies for them, and discouraged they started to trudge back to their miserable homes to suffer the pangs of hunger and cold added to the rigors of a Newfoundland winter. Meanwhile the government has spent such large sums in purchasing supplies in constructing the Placentia railway with native labor and so save people of the districts from starvation, that the treasury is depleted. Added to this is the fact that the Newfoundland fish is a glut on every market owing to the inability to compete with that of their bounty-fed French rivals. It is truly said that the island presents to the world the most mournful spectacle of distress. Its people are the most miserable of all colonists. Compared with them, the peasants of Ireland are happy, contented and prosperous.