DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY. 119 



every Chinman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and pay to 

 the State's appointed officer ten dollars for the service, when there are plenty of 

 doctors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it for him for fifty 

 cents. 



It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights 

 that any njan was bound to respect ; that he had no sorrows that any man was 

 bound to pity; that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the purchase of a 

 penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody loved Chinamen, 

 nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it was convenient 

 to inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, 

 joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers. 



And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this sunny-hearted 

 boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming with freshly- 

 learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself — 



" Ah, there goes a Chinaman ! God will not love me if I do not stone him." 



And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail. 



Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to stone 

 a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty that he is punished 

 for it — he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one of the principal 

 recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery, is to look on with 

 tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan Street set their dogs on un- 

 offending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives. * 



Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire " Pacific 

 coast" gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the virtuous 

 flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco proclaim (as they 



* I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present of one particular one, 

 where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a 

 basket of clothes on his head ; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the 

 hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down his throat with half a brick. 

 This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the 

 fact that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to pub- 

 lish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper. 



