Alexandria Gazette & Daily Advertiser

Philadelphia, April 5.

Extract of a letter dated Tunis, Dec. 11, to a Gentleman in Boston.

The plague, after desolating the kingdom of Algiers, has appeared here also. It broke out early in October in this city, and has since spread through a great part of the kingdom. It is estimated that the Bey loses more than 2000 subjects daily. In this city alone, whose population does not much exceed 100,000, the number of deaths per day is about 300. On one day last week it amounted to 350, and we think quite favourably of the public health when it descends towards 200. I will not attempt to depict to you the horrors of pestilence. My mind has been so overplied with them that it has lost all excitability, and all feeling of personal danger. The population of the city has already suffered a diminution of more than 30,000 by death and emigration--probably more than 15,000 have fallen victims to the plague in the course of 3 months. One vast suburb is literally dispeopled. You may form some idea of the ravages of the malady, and of the exactness with which justice is here administered in certain respects, from the remarkable fact that a poor cobler was the other day summoned from his stall, at the corner of a neighboring street, to take possession as sole inheritor, of twelve different estates at once. As I sit in my parlour I hear during the day almost one unbroken song from the funeral processions passing beneath the windows, like platoons of the same army, often bearing two bodies on the same bier, and of which no less than ninety have fallen under our observation in the course of a few hours. The burden of their hymn is frequently that charitable text of the Koran, "Send, O Allah, send death to the infidels." The stillness of the night is broken by the shrieks of woman, heard from every quarter, lamenting in the oriental manner over the bodies of those who have just ceased to live. It is, of course, impossible to calculate the duration of this calamity: but there is reason to fear it will increase in the spring. We once read together Thucydides's account of the plague of Athens, little thinking at that time that one of us should afterwards be called to witness a similar scene. His description applies almost exactly to the plague now raging here, and to that I refer you: or, if Greek is unfashionable, among gentlemen of the law, you will find the same account more at length in Lucretius, lib. 6.

I came to this place with a becoming diffidence, but I now think myself qualified to be minister at Constantinople. To be serious, when a nation keeps constantly a display of power before these barbarians, its representative has only to use common sense and discretion--or rather to abstain from imprudence and folly--in order to be respected and to accomplish all his ends. It requires however some decision of character to make a stand against the imposing airs of a despotic government, and some knowledge of mankind to detect the punic craftiness and wiles of the court of Tunis.