The famine in Algeria.

The details given by the newspapers about the scourge that at this moment is decimating the Arab populations of Algeria have nothing exaggerated about them, and are confirmed by all the private correspondence. One of our subscribers from Sétif, Mr. Dumas, was good enough to send us a photograph representing the multitude of natives gathered in front of the house where they distribute relief. This drawing, of a painful truthfulness, is accompanied by the following printed notice:

“After the successively calamitous years that our great colony has gone through, an even more terrible scourge has come to fall upon it: famine.

“No sooner had the first rigors of winter made themselves felt than one sees that at our gates the Arabs are dying of hunger. They arrive in numerous bands, half-naked, their bodies exhausted, weeping from hunger and cold, imploring public compassion, disputing with the voracity of the dogs a few scraps cast out with the filth onto the public thoroughfare.

“Although the inhabitants of Sétif have also been reduced to cruel extremities, they cannot contemplate such misery with an impassive gaze. At once, and spontaneously, a charity committee was organized, under the presidency of Mr. Bizet, parish priest of Sétif [see The death of Mr. Bizet, parish priest of Sétif]. A subscription is open; each one gives his mite and, in consequence, daily relief was distributed at the presbytery to two hundred and fifty native women and children.

“In the last days of January, while an abundant and long-desired snow was falling in our regions, it was possible to do even better. An oven was installed in a vast place; there, twice a day, the members of the committee distribute food, no longer to two hundred and fifty, but to five hundred native women or children. There, at last, these unfortunate ones find a refuge and a shelter.

“But, alas! the Europeans are obliged, much against their will, to limit their relief to women and children… To alleviate all the miseries, a good part of the wheat that the powerful caids hold in their silos would be needed. Nevertheless, they hope to continue their distributions until the middle of the month of April.”

If, in this circumstance, we did not open a special subscription at the offices of the Review, it is because we knew that our brethren in belief were not the last to bring their offering to the offices of their district, opened, for that purpose, by the care of the authorities. The donations sent to us with that aim were deposited there. Mr. Captain Bourgès, of the garrison of Laghouat, wrote us the following in this regard:

“For some years now scourges have succeeded one another in Algeria: earthquakes, invasion of locusts, cholera, drought, typhus, famine, profound misery have come, one after another, to strike the natives, who now expiate their improvidence and their fanaticism. Men and even animals die of hunger and are extinguished without a sound. The famine extends to Morocco and to Tunisia; nevertheless, I believe it is Algeria that suffers the most. You could not believe how moving it is to see those gaunt and wasted bodies, seeking food everywhere and disputing it with the street dogs. In the morning, these living skeletons hasten around the camp and hurl themselves upon the excrements to extract from them the grains of barley not digested by the horses, on which they immediately feast. Others gnaw bones, to suck out the gelatin that may still be found in them, or eat the rare grass that grows near the oases. Out of the midst of this misery there arises a horrible debauchery, which spreads to the lowest strata of the colony, and scatters over the material bodies those corrosive sores that must have been the leprosy of antiquity. My eyes close so as not to see so much shame, and my soul rises up to the heavenly Father, to ask Him to preserve the good from impure contact and to give weak men the strength not to let themselves be dragged into that sickly abyss. “Humanity is still very far from the moral progress that certain philosophers believed already accomplished. I see around me nothing but epicureans, who will not hear talk of the Spirit; they do not want to come out of animality; their pride makes them attribute to themselves a noble origin and, yet, their acts say well enough what they were formerly.

“Seeing what is happening, one would really believe that the Arab race is doomed to disappear from the soil, for, in spite of the charity exercised toward it, and the relief brought to it, it takes pleasure in its idleness, without any feeling of gratitude. This physical misery, proceeding from moral sores, still has its usefulness. The egoist, obsessed, jostled at every hour by the unfortunate one who follows him, ends by opening his hand, and his moved heart feels, at last, the gentle joys that charity affords. A feeling that will not be effaced, and perhaps even that of gratitude, will arise in the heart of the one who is assisted. A sympathetic bond is then formed; new relief comes to give life to the unhappy one who was being extinguished and, from discouragement, the latter passes to hope. What seemed an evil has given birth to a good: one egoist fewer and one courageous man more.” The Spirits were not mistaken when they announced that scourges of every sort would devastate the Earth. It is known that Algeria is not the only country in trial. In the Review of July 1867, we described the terrible disease that, a year ago, was scourging the island of Mauritius. A recent letter says that to the disease new misfortunes have come to be added, and many other regions are at this moment victims of disastrous events.

Must Providence be accused for all these miseries? No, but ignorance, neglect—consequences of ignorance—egoism, pride, and the passions of men. God wills only the good; He made everything for the good; He gave men the means to be happy: it is for them to apply them, if they do not wish to acquire experience at their own cost. It would be easy to demonstrate that all scourges could be averted, or at least attenuated, in such a way as to paralyze their effects; this is what we shall do later, in a special work. Men must blame only themselves for the evils they endure. Algeria offers us at this moment a notable example: it is the Arab populations, heedless and improvident, brutalized by fanaticism, who suffer hunger, whereas the Europeans knew how to guard themselves against it. But there are other scourges, no less disastrous, against which the latter have not yet known how to forearm themselves. The very violence of the evil will constrain men to seek the remedy; and when, in vain, they have exhausted the palliatives, they will understand the necessity of attacking the evil at its very root, by heroic means. This will be one of the results of the transformation that is being wrought in Humanity.

But, they will say, what does the happiness of future generations matter to those who suffer now? They will have had the labor and the others the profit; they will have worked, borne the burden of all the miseries inseparable from ignorance, prepared the ways, and the others will reap, because God will have caused them to be born in better times. What does the most wholesome regime in which we live matter to the victims of the exactions of the Middle Ages? Can this be called justice?

It is well known that, until today, no philosophy, no religious doctrine had resolved this grave question, of such powerful interest, nevertheless, to Humanity. Spiritism alone gives it a rational solution through reincarnation, that key to so many problems that were thought insoluble. By virtue of the plurality of existences, the generations that succeed one another are composed of the same spiritual individualities, which are reborn at different epochs and profit from the improvements that they themselves prepared, from the experience they acquired in the past. They are new men who are born; they are the same men who are reborn more advanced. Each generation working for the future, in reality works on its own account. The Middle Ages were, assuredly, a very calamitous epoch; reviving today, the men of that time benefit from the progress accomplished and are happier, because they have better institutions. But who made these institutions better? The very same who formerly had made them bad. Since those of today are to revive later, in a milieu still more purified, they will gather what they have sown; they will be more enlightened, and neither their sufferings nor their earlier labors will have been in vain. What courage, what resignation this idea would give them, inculcated in the mind of men! (See Genesis, chapter XVIII, nos. 34 and 35.)