Hunger in AlgeriaThe details given by the newspapers on the scourge that is currently decimating the Arab populations of Algeria are not exaggerated and are confirmed by every private correspondence. One of our subscribers from Setif, Mr. Dumas, was kind enough to send us a photograph showing the crowd of natives gathered in front of the house where they are distributing aid. The image, of a heartbreaking reality, is accompanied by the following printed instructions:
“After the successively calamitous years that our great colony has gone through, an even more terrible scourge has come down on it: famine.
The first harsh winter had hardly made itself felt when we saw the Arabs dying of hunger at our doors; they arrive in large groups, half-naked, exhausted bodies, weeping with hunger and cold, imploring public commiseration, disputing with the voracity of the dogs some debris thrown with the dirt on the public highway.
Although reduced to brutal extremes themselves, the inhabitants of Setif cannot contemplate such deep misery with an impassive eye. Immediately, and spontaneously, a charitable commission was organized under the chairmanship of Mr. Bizet, parish priest of Setif; a subscription was opened, each one gives his mite, and consequently daily help has been distributed in the presbytery, to two hundred and fifty native women or children.
In the last days of January, while an abundant and long-desired snowfall fell on our regions, we were able to do even better. A stove has been installed in a large room; there, the members of the commission distribute food twice a day, no longer to two hundred and fifty, but to five hundred native women or children; these unfortunate people finally find an asylum and a shelter there.
But unfortunately, the Europeans are obliged, and quite reluctantly, to limit their aid to women and children ... To alleviate all the miseries, it would take a good part of the wheat that the powerful Qaids hold in their silos; however, they hope to be able to continue their distributions until the middle of April."
If we did not open, in this circumstance, a special subscription at the offices of the Spiritist Review, it is because we knew that our brothers in belief were not the last ones to take their offering to the offices of their circumscription, opened for this purpose by the authorities. Donations sent to us for this purpose have been deposited there.
Captain Bourgès, stationed at Laghouat, writes the following on this subject:
“For several years, the plagues have followed one another in Algeria: earthquakes, invasion of locusts, cholera, drought, typhus, famine, deep misery have come in turn to reach the natives that, now atone their improvidence and fanaticism. Men and animals even starve and die silently. Starvation spreads in Morocco and Tunisia; I believe that Algeria is more affected, though. You would not believe how touching is to see these haggard and frail bodies everywhere, looking for their food, and fighting for it with stray dogs. In the morning, these living skeletons run around the camp and rush to the manure to extract the barley grains undigested by the horses, and on which they feed instantly. Others chew on bones to suck on the gelatin that may still be there or eat the rare grass that grows around the oasis. From the midst of this misery arises a hideous debauchery that reaches the bottom of the colony, and spreads in material bodies those corrosive wounds that must have been the leprosy of antiquity. My eyes close so as not to see so much shame, and my soul ascends to the Heavenly Father to pray for him to preserve the good from the impure contact, and to give weak men the strength not to be drawn into this unhealthy abyss.
Humanity is still a long way from the moral progress that some philosophers believe has already been accomplished. I see around me only Epicureans who do not want to hear about the Spirit; they do not want to get out of animality; their pride attributes to itself a noble origin, and yet their acts clearly say what they once were.
By seeing what is happening, one would really believe that the Arab race is called upon to disappear from Earth, for despite the charity that we exercise towards it and the help that is brought, it takes pleasure in its laziness, without any feeling of gratitude. This physical misery, resulting from moral wounds, still has its use. The selfish, obsessed, always elbowed by the miserable that follows him, ends up opening his hand, and his touched heart at last feels the sweet joys brought by charity. A feeling that will not be erased has just been born, and perhaps even that of gratitude will arise in the heart of the one that is assisted. A sympathetic bond is then formed; new help comes along to give life to the unfortunate man that was perishing, and from discouragement he moves on to hope. What appeared to be an evil gave birth to a good: one less selfish and one more courageous man.”
The Spirits were not mistaken when they announced that plagues of all kinds would ravage Earth. We know that Algeria is not the only country that has suffered. In the Spiritist Review of July 1867, we described the terrible disease that had been raging for a year in Mauritius; a recent letter says that the disease has been added to new misfortunes, and many other countries are now victims of disastrous events.
Should we accuse the Providence of all these miseries? No, but ignorance, carelessness, the result of ignorance, selfishness, pride, and the passions of men. God only wants the good; he did everything for the good; he gave men the means to be happy: it is up to them to apply them if they do not want to acquire experience at their own expense. It would be easy to demonstrate that all scourges could be averted, or at least mitigated to paralyze their effects; this is what we will do later in a special book. Men should only blame themselves for the evils they endure; Algeria offers us, at this time, a remarkable example: it is the Arab populations, lighthearted and improvident, brutalized by fanaticism, that suffer from famine, while the Europeans knew how to protect themselves from it; but there are other not less disastrous scourges, against which the latter have not yet been able to guard themselves.
The very violence of the evil will force men to seek the remedy, and when they have uselessly exhausted the palliatives, they will understand the need to attack the evil at its own root, by heroic means. This will be one of the results of the transformation that is taking place in humanity.
But it will be asked, what does the happiness of future generations matter to those who suffer now? They will have had the trouble and the others the benefit; they will have worked, borne the burden of all the miseries inseparable from ignorance, prepared the ways, and the others, because God will have given birth to them in better times, will reap. What does the healthier regime, under which we live, do to the victims of the atrocities of the Middle Ages? Can we call it justice?
It is a fact that, until this day, no philosophy, no religious doctrine had solved this serious question, of such a powerful interest, however, for humanity. Spiritism alone provides a rational solution through reincarnation, this key to so many problems that were believed to be insoluble. By the fact of the plurality of existences, the generations that succeed one another are composed of the same spiritual individualities that are reborn at different times, benefiting from the improvements that they themselves have prepared, from the experience that they have acquired in the past. It is not new men that are born; these are the same men who are reborn more advanced. Each generation working for the future works, in fact, for its own benefit. The Middle Ages were assuredly a very calamitous period; the men of that time, living again today, benefit from the progress made, and are happier, because they have better institutions; but who made these institutions better? The very ones who once had bad ones; those of today who will have to live again later, in an even more refined environment, will reap what they have sown; they will be more enlightened, and neither their sufferings nor their previous labors will have been wasted. What a courage, what a resignation wouldn’t this idea, inculcated in the Spirits, give to men! (See Genesis, chap. XVIII, items 34 and 35).
