its utmost, in China, lest the swarming population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead.  Since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep.  Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China’s bitter opposition to railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends.

A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him.  Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in case of death.  On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die.  The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of these.  The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast.  Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous priesthood.  In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked.  Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses—­or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration.  The bill was offered, whether it passed or not.  It is my impression that it passed.  There was another bill—­it became a law—­compelling every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it.  As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makers thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese immigration.

What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—­or, indeed, what the Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like—­may be gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting for that paper: