Daily Evening Star

THE CHOLERA.

We have never yet seen any good resulting from the falsifying of facts with the view of allaying public excitement; and the repeated attempts of too many journalists to produce the impression, at home and abroad, that their respective cities are in a healthy condition, in the face of the too well ascertained fact that "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" is in their midst, can be viewed in no other light than that of culpably criminal acts.

The fact can no longer be disguised that the cholera, which first appeared this year in the south-west, is gradually spreading over the whole country, seizing its victims without respect to age, sex, condition or locality. In Boston, New York, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia, the disease is raging to an extent, and with a fatality, which the traveling public have no proper conception of. On the Atlantic coast, south of Philadelphia, we hear of but few cases. The scourge has not made its appearance in Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington or Charleston. Strange to say, it has not appeared in Mobile or New Orleans. In the interior of North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, a few cases have occurred, accompanied with the usual exaggerated reports.

Although it would prove highly satisfactory to the pockets and feelings of the proprietors of the New York and Philadelphia hotels to have their establishments well filled with Southern and Western travelers, still the latter should be apprised of the fact that the cholera prevails in Philadelphia to a serious, and in New York to an alarming extent. We want no better evidence in support of this assertion than in the fact that the Boards of Health in New York and Brooklyn have refused to give publicity to the daily list of persons dying with the cholera.

The reporter of the New York Evening Post who visited the Franklin street hospital of that city, yesterday morning, with the view of obtaining some information in regard to the number of cholera patients it had received during the preceding twenty-four hours, was informed that instructions had been given not to make the desired communication. He thus speaks of the hospital and its inmates:

"The wards in the hospital, however, were quite full, presenting a spectacle calculated to produce both horror and alarm. The dead and the dying were lying near each other, and both of them in full sight of the newly-arrived patients. It is greatly to be regretted that the patients are not furnished with separate rooms. The peculiar nature of the disease, the shocking spectacle of those who are in its last stages, and the terror it must inspire in the minds of those patients who are not past the power of observing what is going on around them, impose a necessity of separating the sufferers as much as possible. The cure of cholera often depends upon keeping the patient in a calm and hopeful state of mind. Terror always aggravates the symptoms, and sometimes we doubt not produces death."