Starvation

“ Think what it must be to look into the half empty meal-girnel, and at the little heap of potatoes, and know that that is all between them and starvation, till more is earned,--that the smallest miscarriage, a delay in receiving the weekly wage, a stumble ending in a sprain, sickness of a child, even an accident to a horse or a car, may entail a supperless night, or a day of hunger! ”

“ Terrible stories were told by historians of the straits to which the people were reduced by famines in the old days before there were railways to distribute the grain, or to carry the multitudes to the water-springs that were not exhausted. Men and women in the throes of starvation were like beasts, ready to tear each other to pieces in the madness of their hunger, and to slay each other for a cup of water. ”

“ Is it, then, any wonder that the poor should die of starvation? If this is true (and this fact has been admitted by the most thoughtful men) it must necessarily follow that all the food that we eat beyond our immediate need is food filched from the stomachs of the poor. ”

“ At this moment, a poor, famine-struck looking woman, with three or four children, the very pictures of starvation and misery, came to the door, and, in that voice of terrible destitution, which rings feeble and hollow from an empty and exhausted frame, she implored them for some food. ”

“ It is useless for me to describe it—it is a complete bundle of rags; and by adding to these troubles grim starvation, which all along has been gnawing at our bowels, we have a summary of our calamities, the details of which would be sickening. But, thank God! we are now in reality on the point of surmounting or ending our wretchedness and misery. ”

“ Famine added its horrors to the stupendous weight of afflictions under which the people were groaning. The gaunt spectre of starvation stalked abroad amidst them, and the prospect of a slow and painful death haunted their vision.... People and government alike sighed for the relief which they could nowhere obtain. ”

“ The starving men and women—the children died quickly—ate first all that was available in the stores and homes, then scrabbled in the fields for a forgotten grain of rice or wheat; they ate the bark and fungus from the trees and gleaned the pastures of their weeds and dung. As they ate they moved on, their faminedistended stomachs craving more to eat, driving the ones who were but one step further from starvation ever before them. ”

“ Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It’s really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one’s soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. ”

“ Tillett,—I have not had patience to read Professor Huxley's letters. The existence of hunger, nakedness, misery, 'death from insufficient food,' even of starvation, is certain, and no agency as yet reaches it. How can any man hinder or discourage the giving of food or help? Why is the house called a workhouse? Because it is for those who cannot work? ”

“ They had endured slow starvation with pathetic dignity, but the smell and sight of savory stew was too much for decorum, and half the emptied jars were thrown aside with a crash in the mad rush for full ones.
Many settlements have perished for lack of food. Starvation is an ill as old as the human race. It shows its skeleton head at some place on our globe almost every year of the world. ”

“ History in that case, feels bound to consider that starvation is starvation; that starvation presupposes much; history ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of Nine-three, who roused from a long death sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers and die fighting for an immortal hope and faith of deliverance for him and his, was but the second miserablest of men. ”

“ But when a more progressive soul declared that in bran alone the true nutriment lay, and a host of would-be healthier people proceeded to eat bran and preach bran, there came a time when eating and preaching both stopped, from sheer want of strength to go on. The enthusiasts were literally starving themselves to death—for starvation is by no means mere deprivation of food: on the contrary, a man may eat heartily to the day of his death, and feel no inconvenience, so far as any protest of the stomach is concerned, yet the verdict of the wise physician would be, "Died of starvation." ”

“ To-night comes news that hundreds of deaths from starvation have already occurred, and that even high-caste women are working on the roads;—no food from stores of ours except at the price of degrading, health-destroying, and perfectly useless toil. ”

“ In the afternoon, their hunger increased to such a degree, that they could have eaten any thing except human flesh. Sixty hours had now elapsed without their having tasted food of any kind, and the appalling idea of suffering by starvation for the first time obtruded itself. ”

“ Man's constitution is so peculiar that his health is purely a negative matter. No sooner is the rage of hunger appeased than it becomes difficult to comprehend the meaning of starvation. It is only when you suffer that you really understand. ”

“ Over twenty million have died of starvation—without even a chance to fight. To these death has come only as a relief from torture worse than death—starvation.
It is our job—yours and ours—to save food so that the millions of starving people in Europe may have SOMETHING to eat. ”

“ That we may have a proper relish for our food and a due appreciation of the blessings of a good appetite, it may be necessary that we feel the pangs of hunger and starvation occasionally; but to give us this wholesome discipline it would seem hardly necessary that millions of human beings should actually be starved to death! ”

“ For the purposes of the text, Starvation may be defined as the denial of food by accident or design to a system, non-diseased, but clamoring for sustenance. Hunger indicates the need, and, whenever its call is sounded, fatal consequences ensue in case of neglect or omission to feed. ”

“ I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that in some country district there was once a great scarcity of food, during which the poor suffered acutely; many indeed actually died of starvation, and all were hard put to it. ”

“ There was always something for the really needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation. ”

“ But although beyond doubt the allowance of food was sufficient for an average man, there must have been in those twenty years thousands of men with hearty appetites who finished their ration hungry and dissatisfied—and the sequel will show that there were others who actually died of starvation, owing to their own vices. ”

“ They have their times of plenty and times of famine. In good times they feast; in bad times they die of starvation. But starvation, as a chronic condition, present with a large number of them all the time, is a thing unknown. ”

“ The sufferings among the poor are fearful. The sufferers are chiefly widows and young children, who, for lack of nourishment, are unable to withstand the intense heat. Instances of actual starvation are mentioned. ”

“ While in nearly all lands there are only a few cases of actual starvation reported, there is a vast population in every country I visited who have a limited supply of food, or such food as is incompetent to sustain physical vigor. ”

“ People, and people too whom I know as really well-to-do citizens, are dying of sheer starvation. As for the poor women and children it is truly heart breaking. Oh, my dear friend, if you had only stopped away; for here you can do nothing. But I knew you would come back, and I honor you for it. ”

“ How many times haven't I saved this settlement from starvation? Absolute starvation. Only three months ago I distributed again a lot of rice on credit. There was nothing to eat in this infernal place. They came begging on their knees. ”

“ Thousands had already died of starvation and the diseases consequent on hunger. Those that managed to exist did so in filth, and dying every day, as Swift wrote on another occasion, "and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth and vermin." ”

“ IN POVERTY GAP, WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH ST. AN ENGLISH COAL-HEAVER’S HOME. [17]
Every once in a while a case of downright starvation gets into the newspapers and makes a sensation. But this is the exception. Were the whole truth known, it would come home to the community with a shock that would rouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic undoing of its purse-strings. I am satisfied from my own observation that hundreds of men, women, and children are every day slowly starving to death in the tenements with my medical friend’s complaint of “improper nourishment.” ”

“ People don’t realize what it is to starve faculties; they understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is what they do not understand. ”

“ If I hadn't died from my fall and exposure, I'd have died pretty soon from starvation. Do you know that?"
"I know," she retorted with great mock severity, "that this is my case; you're my patient, and I'm the doctor and the nurse. And that you're talking, while I believe the proper thing for people who are sick is to lie still. Also, you're not going to die of starvation now. ”

“ But in chronic cases, lasting over months and years, where the fatal issue is often determined at last by mere protracted starvation, I had rather not enumerate the instances which I have known where a little ingenuity, and a great deal of perseverance, might, in all probability, have averted the result. ”

“ Not a word do we ever hear from them about our right to be kept from starvation; and they expect us to be wonderfully grateful for a parish dole, while they cut off a pound of meat a week from every poor soul’s allowance within yonder walls, and advise us to mix rye with our wheaten bread.—’Tis true, as I’m alive! ”

“ My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
VIOLET. The Famine?
MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. ”

“ As a matter of fact, if it comes to starvation, if we aren't rescued and taken out from under the red-hot wreckage that's on top of us, I'll outlive you! I can exist on my surplus adipose tissue, for a while ”

“ I have read of occurrences in the daily papers which prove to me that here, too, in this great "free land," people are doomed to die of starvation. This brought me to reflection, and to the question: What are the peculiar causes that could bring about such a condition of society? ”

“ Had that fearful famine, which in the present century desolated the land, fallen upon a people who thought more of accumulating subsistence than of avoiding sin, multitudes might now be living who perished by literal starvation on the dreary hills of Limerick or Skibbereen. ”

“ We see millions still struggling in vain for a sufficiency of the bare necessaries of life (which in their misery is all they ask) , often culminating in actual starvation, or in suicide to which they are driven by the dread of starvation. ”

“ And among all its cold-blooded characteristics there is none so utterly unaccountable as that frightful dread of famine and ultimate starvation, which is also strong in proportion to the impossibility of its ever being realized. ”

“ Actual starvation confronts more rarely those belonging to the class of manual workers, but for them also under-nutrition is a possibility which prolonged illness or inability to obtain employment may at any time change into a reality. ”

“ Nor were the starving condition of the honest poor, who were to be met with at all times of day and in every street, seeking something to appease their hunger, less remarkable—unable to procure by any means within their power sustenance sufficient to support nature, some actually became the victims of absolute starvation, as the following melancholly instance will show:—a poor man exhausted by want ”

“ But go to the squalid portion of any of your large cities, where Poverty and Disease go hand in hand, where the child receives its life and its first nourishment from a haggard and discontented mother. Starvation is her daily dread. The little tendernesses that make home the haven of the heart, are never known to her. Ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-cherished, all that might be refined and elevated in her nature, if properly cultivated, is choked into starveling shapes by her enemy—Want. ”

“ At the moment of writing this page, an English journal furnishes a case of death from starvation, and closes its account with the following paragraph, strikingly illustrative of the state of things which naturally arises where every man is "trying to live by snatching the bread from his neighbour's mouth."
"It is hardly possible to conceive a more horrible case. ”

“ Oh, Fred, Fred, in my professional career, short though it has been, I have seen much of these poor old women, and many others, whom the world never sees on the streets at all, experiencing a slow, lingering death by starvation, and fatigue, and cold. It is the foulest blot on our country that there is no sufficient provision for the aged poor. ”

“ Thus, though I walked sometimes twenty-four miles in a day, and was out for eight or ten hours, I never had a penny with which to buy even a bit of bread, and many a time sank down by the wayside from the faintness of sheer starvation, often most gratefully accepting some of the food from the common working people I met. ”

“ The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.... ”