The dying and the dead were strewn along the cross-country roads. Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells, because the deaths were too numerous for the miserable relatives to perform the usual funeral rites. Mothers sold their children for a single scanty meal. Husbands flung their wives into ponds, to escape the torment of seeing them perish by the lingering agonies of hunger. Amid these scenes of death the Government of India kept its serenity and cheerfulness unimpaired. The journals of the North-West were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians, under no circumstances to countenance the pretence of the natives that they were dying of hunger. One civilian, a Mr. MacMinn, unable to endure the misery around him, opened a relief work at his own expense. He was severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation, and ordered to close the work immediately. All this time, not a whisper of the tragedy that was being enacted in the North-West Provinces had reached Calcutta. The district officials dared not communicate to the press what they knew, and in India there are hardly any other means of obtaining information. But in the month of February Mr. Knight, the proprietor of the Calcutta _Statesman_, had occasion to visit Agra. He was astonished to find all around him the indications of an appalling misery. He began to investigate the matter, and gradually the truth revealed itself. A quarter of a million of British subjects had perished of hunger, pursued even to their graves by the pitiless exactions of the Government. Mr. Knight made known in the columns of the _Statesman_ what he had seen, and what he had learned from others in the course of his inquiries. The guilty consciences of those who were responsible for this vast suffering smote them. Lord Lytton and Sir George Couper felt that it was necessary to extinguish Mr. Knight--and that speedily. Sir George Couper accordingly drew up a long Minute, vindicating himself from the attacks of Mr. Knight; and this Minute was duly acknowledged in laudatory terms by the Government of India. The Viceroy in Council characterized the Minute as "a convincing statement of facts," and then added that the Government of India needed no such statement to convince it that the "Lieutenant-Governor had exercised forethought in his arrangements, and had shown humanity in his orders throughout the recent crisis." The mortality which Lord Lytton "deplored" with "a deep and painful regret," in so far "as it was directly the result of famine, was caused rather by the unwillingness of the people to leave their homes than by any want of forethought on the part of the local government in providing works where they might be relieved." Lord Lytton "unhesitatingly accepted the statement of the local government that no one who was willing to go to a relief work need have died of famine, and it is satisfactorily shown in his Honour's Minute that the relief wage was ample."