Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Wave of Horror (1912).djvu/22

 Over in famishing India King George holding high carnival at his Durbar acclamation—the regal fete that proclaims him tyrant of the Hindoos.

Millions of dollars spent in gorgeous festivities for this royal bum—dollars wrung from the sweat and anguish of the working class—and at the very moment millions starving to death in India because English lords have robbed them of their products.

A famine in India? Yes. A famine in China? Yes. But the granaries of India and China are full of food, the product of fat years before the famine came.

But those that produced all this food do not own it.

The capitalists, who do no work—the loafers—they own the bread, because we run our social system that way.

Listen—Bishop Sellow, of the Free Methodist Church, a returned missionary from the famine district in China, states that though hundreds of thousands have died of the pestilence brought on by hunger, there is no real shortage of food, but the food is in the hands of a few men.

"There is food in plenty," declares Bishop Sellow, "within reach of the famine area, but it is just as impossible for a starving people to obtain a handful of rice as it would be for a pauper to borrow money without security. In the famine area there is rice in plenty. But the upper classes have it for sale."

"The upper classes have it for sale"—did you ever notice anything similar to this in America?

When it comes to dollars and cents, what's the difference between a "heathen" and a "Christian" plutocrat, anyway?

The truth is, there are no real famines.

Nature can produce enough in one good year to feed the world for three or four years, and occasionally withholds the rain in order to give the soil a little rest. Of