At the present time the
number on the island is 703, including 22 children. These
unfortunates are necessarily pauperised, and the small Hawaiian
kingdom finds itself much burdened by their support. The strain on
the national resources is very great, and it is not surprising that
officials called upon to meet such a sad emergency should be
assailed in all quarters of the globe by sentimental criticism and
misstatements regarding the provision made for the lepers on
Molokai. Most of these are unfounded, and the members of the Board
of Health deserve great credit both for their humanity and for their
prompt and careful attention to the complaints made by the
sufferers.
At present the two obvious blots on the system are, the insufficient
house accommodation, involving a herding together which is repulsive
to foreign, though not to native, ideas; and the absence of a
resident physician to prescribe for the ailments from which leprosy
is no exemption. Molokai, the island of exile, is Molokai aina
pali, "the land of precipices," in the old native meles, and its
walls of rock rise perpendicularly from the sea to a height varying
from 1000 to 2500 feet, in extreme grandeur and picturesqueness, and
are slashed, as on Hawaii, by gulches opening out on natural lawns
on the sea level.
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