matters Oriental; and the boss system merged in straight industrial unionism.  You still go to a boss to get your gangs of workmen; but the boss is secretary of a benevolent association; and if he takes any higher toll than an employment agent’s commission, the immigration department has never been able to detect it.  “I have no hesitation in saying,” declared an immigration official, “that for four years there has not been a case of boss slavery that could be proved in the courts.  There has not been a case that could be proved in the courts of women and children being brought in for evil purposes.  Only merchants’ wives, students, and that class can come in.  The other day an old fellow tried to bring a young woman in.  We suspected he had left an old wife in China; but we could not prove it; so we charged him five hundred dollars for the entrance of this one and had them married on the spot.  Whenever there is the slightest doubt about their being married, we take no chances, charge them five hundred dollars and have the knot tied right here and now.  Then the man has to treat the woman as a wife and support her; or she can sue him; and we can punish and deport him.  There is no more of little girls being brought in to be sold for slavery and worse.”

All the same, some evils of the boss system still exist.  The boss system taught the Chinaman organization, and to-day, even with higher wages, your forty-five dollars a month cook will do no gardening.  You ask him why.  “They will cut my throat,” he tells you; and if he goes out to mow the lawn, he is soon surrounded by fellow countrymen who hoot and jeer him.

“Would they cut his throat?” I asked a Chinaman.

“No; but maybe, the benevolent association or his tong fine him.”

So you see why labor no longer fears the Chinaman and welcomes him to industrial unionism, a revolution in the attitude of labor which has taken place in the last year.  Make a note of these facts: 

The poll tax has trebled expenses for the householder.

The poll tax has created industrial unionism among the Chinese.

The poll tax has not kept the Chinaman out.

How about the Chinese vices?  Are they a stench to Heaven as the Hindu’s?  I can testify that they certainly are not open, and they certainly are not aggressive, and they certainly do not claim vice as a right; for I went through Vancouver’s Chinatown with only a Chinaman as an escort (not through “underground dens,” as one paper reported it) after ten at night; and the vices that I saw were innocent, mild, pallid, compared to the white-man vices of Little Italy, New York, or Upper Broadway.  We must have visited in all a dozen gambling joints, two or three midnight restaurants, half a dozen opium places and two theaters; and the only thing that could be remotely constructed into disrespect was the amazement on one drunken white face on the street that a white woman could be going through Chinatown with a Chinaman.