MILLIONS are dying, and millions more must soon die, of famine in Russia. Sir Benjamin Robertson, who has had wide experience of famine in India, says that the main impress which he received from a recent tour of the famine area in the Volga valley is that of hopelessness at the immensity of the calamity, and a secondary impression is that British help might have been more freely given. Dr Nansen has said that private charity can only touch the fringe of the need, and that it must be supplemented by State grants. America, France (in spite of her own financial difficulties), Sweden and Denmark have voted large sums; Great Britain has not. Yet Great Britain has spent £1,200,000 on the relief of Russian officers and their wives from the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel, and even in the current financial year £300,000 have been expended under this head, upon 5,000 persons, a sum which in the famine area would save 400,000 persons. The cynical argument that we are under no particular obligation to keep Bolshevists alive, even if it were not inhuman, is countered by the fact that the Volga area was the last in which a fight against Bolshevism was maintained. The Genoa Conference is an admission that for the good of Europe trade with Russia must be re-opened. But Russia cannot trade if its people are dying in millions. Typhus follows famine, as the night the day, and if we do not relieve famine now we shall have to spend the money hereafter.

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