The Chinaman has bitter enemies in San Francisco:  they thirst to annihilate him.  He is accustomed to blows and brickbats; he is legitimate game for rowdies, both grown and juvenile; and children supposed to be better trained can scarce resist the temptation of snatching at his pig-tail as he passes through their groups in front of the public schools.  Even on Sundays nice little boys coming from Sabbath-school, with their catechisms tucked under their jackets, and texts enjoining mercy and gentleness fresh upon their lips, will sometimes salute the benighted heathen as he passes by with a volley of stones.  If he turns on his small assailants, he is apt to meet larger ones.  Men are not wanting, ready and panting, to take up the quarrel thus wantonly commenced by the offspring of the “superior race.”  There are hundreds of families, who came over the sea to seek in America the comfort and prosperity denied them in the land of their birth, whose children from earliest infancy are inculcated with the sentiment that the Chinaman is a dog, a pest and a curse.  On the occasion of William H. Seward’s visit to a San Francisco theatre, two Chinese merchants were hissed and hooted by the gallery mob from a box which they had ventured to occupy.  This assumption of style and exclusiveness proved very offensive to the shirt-sleeved, upper-tier representatives of the “superior race,” who had assembled in large numbers to catch a glimpse of one of the black man’s great champions.  Ethiopia could have sat in that box in perfect safety, but China in such a place was the red rag rousing the ire of the Democratic bull.  John has a story of his own to carry back home from a Christian land.

For this prejudice and hostility there are provocative causes, although they may not be urged in extenuation.  The Chinaman is a dangerous competitor for the white laborer; and when the latter, with other and smaller mouths to feed, once gets the idea implanted in his mind that the bread is being taken from them by what he deems a semi-human heathen, whose beliefs, habits, appearance and customs are distasteful to him, there are all the conditions ready for a state of mind toward the almond-eyed Oriental which leans far away from brotherly love.

Brotherly love sometimes depends on circumstances.  “Am I not a man and brother?” cries John from his native shore.  “Certainly,” we respond.  Pass round the hat—­let us take up a contribution for the conversion of the poor heathen.  The coins clink thickly in the bottom of the charitable chapeau.  We return home, feeling ourselves raised an inch higher heavenward.

“Am I not a man and brother?” cries John in our midst, digging our gold, setting up opposition laundries and wheeling sand at half a dollar per day less wages.  “No.  Get out, ye long-tailed baste!  An’ wad ye put me on a livil with that—­that baboon?” Pass round the hat.  The coins mass themselves more thickly than ever.  For what?  To buy muskets, powder and ball.  Wherefore?  Wait!  More than once has the demagogue cried, “Drive them into the sea!”