“North China.—A telegram dated 26th January 1878, says: ‘Appalling famine raging throughout four provinces North China. Nine million people reported destitute. Children daily sold in markets for (raising means to procure) food. Foreign Relief Committee appeal to England and America for assistance.’ Total population of districts affected, seventy millions. Mr. Fredk. H. Balfour, of Shanghai, said: ‘The people’s faces are black with hunger; they are dying by thousands upon thousands. Women and girls and boys are openly offered for sale to any chance wayfarer. When I left the country, a respectable married woman could be easily bought for six dollars, and a little girl for two. In cases, however, where it was found impossible to dispose of their children, parents have been known to kill them sooner than witness their prolonged sufferings, in many instances throwing themselves afterwards down wells, or committing suicide by arsenic.’ “‘Lord Derby received a report drawn up by Mr. Mayers, Chinese Secretary of the Legation at Pekin, upon the distress which the drought of the last two years has caused in the northern and central provinces of China. This famine, it seems, has been most severely felt in the district furthest from the coast. With the exception of Chefoo, and, in a lesser degree, Tien-tsin, no foreign settlement has come directly into contact with the misery which has been described as existing in the interior, nor are any immediate traces of it visible in the neighbourhood of the capital. The apparent cause was disturbance in the usually unfailing regularity of the summer monsoons. The spring and summer of 1876 were marked in the southern maritime provinces, Kwangtung and Fuhkien, and in a less degree also along the coast as far north as Ningpo, by an excessive rain-fall, causing in the two provinces above-named disastrous floods and much destruction of crops. In the north, on the contrary, from the Yangtsze to the neighbourhood of Pekin and thence eastward to the borders of Corea, an unusual drought was experienced.’—_Times_, 13th March 1878.