The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1879-12-27
THE PACIFIC
Commercial A0bertlset .
S|ATTRDAY. DECEMBER q.

a dire disease. that has been decimatHg whole fami-
lies f1r months past" " The rayages Of malignant
Pe-tIenee~
The words which we have quoted above are
from an editorial article in last Wednesdays
Gazette. and are fair samples Of the yiciously ex-
aggerated style in which that paper has for sew
eral issues Of late. misrepresented the condition of
the public health OF this city. In its issue Of the
18th November, the Gazette announced that the
fever had entirely disappeared. and congratulated
it, readers upon the general good health Of the
city. Having subsequently, ascertained that at
the very time it was confidently announcing the
di=appearance Of malarial fever the disease was
really more prevalent than it had ever been be-
iOTe-Or in fact has been since,-this model edi-
itOr having supped full Of horrors, produceeded to
rush at once into the extreme Of fear and trepi-
datiOn. And in this mood he cOnjured up a pic
ture Of " n feYer-stricken, suffering community"
81 the distress Of the people, and the ravages Of a
pestIlence that il carrying off so many people,
thus doing his best to create a panic in the COM
munity which might have been almost as perni-
cious in its effects on some minds as an attack of
the fever itself. Doubtless the editor was him
self thoroughly frightened, and while penning
his reckless random statements we can imagine
that
His each particular hair did stand on end
Like quilts upon the fretfuI pOrcupine."
Ills usual obliquity Of mental vision is exhibit
cd when be speaks Of the disease having been en-
gagged in "decimating'' whole families for months
past. To decimate is to take one in ten, and thus
it might appear that we had families here num-
eriealIy constituted on the Mormon plan. And
''thc rayages OF n malignant pestilence'' have been
doing this fearful Uork oF defamation
"Buti in the history Of this dire campaign
More carnage loads the paper than the plain"
When confronted with the figures of mortality
as presented by the President of the Board of
Health, which utterly disprove his panicky state
ments as TO the "ravages of the pestiIence, ~ he
has not the manliness to reproduce them in his
own columns, but critieizes, italicises and mall
capitalizes a simple statement Of fact by the Pre-
sident, the pertinency of emphasizing which is
POI at all apparent.
I Now that the malarial fever, OF which we have
had an unusual experience during the two months
just passed, has practically subsidized, we may not
anticipate that the vicious untruthfulness OF the
Gazette man, persistently adhered to in spite of
the logic of facts, viii have any appreciable effect
in exciting the fears of it's readers here at the
islands, but as we intimated in our last, the mis-
fortune is that the false tatements of the Gazette
as to ''the rayages of a malignant pestilence" in
Honolulu will go abroad, where the character Of
that paper for unreliability is comparatively I'M
known, and where the stories may do us no little
injury before their falsity can be made apparent.
To our friends in California and at the East, who
happen to get copies of the last three issues of the
Gazette, our city will appear to be a second
Memphis, and perhaps the philanthropic may
think of sending US nurses and quinine, in our
dire extremity. But We again beg to assure our
readers and friends abroad that the rate of NOR
tality consequent upon the late prevailing fever
has been by no means large, nor calculated to ex-
cite unusual fears, although, to quote the Ian
guage Of the President of the Board of Health,
"sOme alarm was naturally caused by the decease
Of an unusual number of prominent citizens. 1t
was the direction in which the mortality appear
ed, and not its magnitude which caused alarm.
And in this connection the fact may be stated
that the deaths in the Queens Hospital, which
were included in the official table published in our
last, should not fairly have been so included in
estimating the rate of mortality in the city at
large. This deduction being made, will still fur
Their decrease the rate to not far from the ordlna-
~ figures.