I do not suppose that we can have any conception of the amount of suffering which goes on at the present time in China. The first time we were in China I had the honour of meeting a Mr. Ede, who had just returned from distributing food in a famine-stricken district, and his description was truly terrible; the young men had walked away and found work in other districts, but the old people and the children had to remain. What had caused the famine in this case was characteristic of unreformed China; "China's sorrow," the river Hoang-ho, had done what it is ever doing, that is, it had flooded a district. When you pass over it, it looks most innocuous. It is wholly unable, as a rule, to fill its own vast bed, which is covered with delightful sands, reminding one more than anything else of the sea-shore at low tide; but this sand is what makes it dangerous, for it is not good heavy English sand, but a light sand which is called "loess," and when the river comes down in a flood--that is to say, when they have rainy weather in Thibet or the sun shines unduly on Himalayan snows--this sand is carried along with the water, {57} and it is asserted indeed that the river consists more of sand than of water; as the river slackens the sand is deposited and the bed is filled up, with the result that the next flood, taking the Chinese unawares, overflows its banks and reduces a huge district to poverty; they cannot sow their fields because they cannot see them. Of course the authorities should not be taken by surprise and the banks should be made up, and canals should be cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese engineer assured me he had a scheme for raising the level of huge districts of China by using this peculiar character of the Hoang-ho and turning its sand and water flood on to bare places, and he asserted that the results were most wonderfully successful, and that districts which were unfertile before, when well washed and covered up with this loess, became fertile. Still, however beneficial a flood may be to the land in the end, its immediate result is to starve the population who are flooded out, for they have no reserves of food.