A village priest in an outlying village wrote to a gentleman to whom I brought introductions: “Our peasants are already reduced to one meager meal a day. Parents, overwhelmed by their misery, are abandoning their children and are going off that they may not see them die.” Seven priests in joint conference in the district called Buzuluk appealed to the Red Cross Society: “There is no bread for the people, nor fodder for the cattle. The peasants are picking over the hay they have gathered for their horses--little as it is--and are extracting for their own use spears of the grass called goosefoot. In a few weeks even this will be gone.” The famine relief workers were everywhere beside themselves with the enormity of the problem. Never in the history of Russia had the need been so great, and never had the relief been proportionately so little. Armored trains, machine guns, Cossacks, and soldiers maintained on a war basis, had so strained the financial resources of the government that only the scrapings were left for the alleviation of the famine. The most powerful of nations would find it difficult to meet the exigencies of such a dire situation. Crippled Russia might well be overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of the task. Pressed to the verge of starvation, as these millions of peasants were, they were forced into making sacrifices of inestimable consequences. They were selling their ploughs, their wagons, their own labor for years ahead. They were submitting to obligations as arduous as serfdom. Six peasants, for example, in the village of Bugulma, borrowed $50 from a local priest, and in return gave him the use of six acres of land for sixteen years! Here and there a prosperous priest, or a peasant who had money, loaned it to the starving peasants at rates of interest amounting to 200 and 300 per cent. I heard of four cases of 300 per cent. All of the money which could be thus secured by the peasant went for immediate needs, no provision being made for seeds for the next year, and as the implements were nearly all being sold it will be years before the peasants of the famine districts get back to even the deplorably miserable condition of this year.