The Hawaiian Gazette

To multiply bureaus of the Government is not an advantage, but we think there would be a direct advantage in establishing a statistical bureau. The present record of births and deaths upon the islands is utterly inaccurate. There is some accuracy with regard to Honolulu, but outside Honolulu it is all haphazard. Statistics are obtained, but they are not reliable.

In many of the bureaus of the Government very excellent statistics are obtained, but they need collation. Each bureau supplies what it can, and some of them supply excellent material, but they only particularize, they do not generalize. It should be the duty of some portion of the Government to generalize the information.

Mr. Thrum, in his Annual, does this kind of work and it is very ably done. We doubt whether the community fully understand how much they are obliged to Mr. Thrum for his admirable work, but his work is not official and he has not time to work out the details of, nor has he authority to collate.

Most countries pride themselves upon putting forward the very best showing for themselves in an authoritative form. We do not because we have no proper method of sifting the material laid before us. What is needed is to show what our industries are, what they can do, what our birth rate is, what our death rate is, what our marriage rate is, what our lands are, what our land system is, and so on—such information, published under Government authority and made as accurate as it is possible, would be of infinite value.

We have only to open the books of communities that seek to attract immigrants to their shores, to see how much pains they take to put the information, worth having, in an authoritative way before any one who may need it. This is one side of the question, the other is, that for our own advancement we may learn much and may stop many foolish enterprises, if we have a dependable set of statistics to guide us.

Without statistics, reliable statistics, upon every point a nation is very much in the position of a man who has a large fortune and spends it without keeping account and seeing what each field or each herd of cattle is doing. As a matter of fact our Legislators however intelligent they are, are very far behind their duty, because through absence of collated statistics they don't thoroughly understand what they are dealing with.