DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

In San Francisco, the other day, “A well-dressed boy, on his way to Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning Chinamen.”

What a commentary is this upon human justice!  What sad prominence it gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak!  San Francisco has little right to take credit to herself for her treatment of this poor boy.  What had the child’s education been?  How should he suppose it was wrong to stone a Chinaman?  Before we side against him, along with outraged San Francisco, let us give him a chance—­let us hear the testimony for the defense.

He was a “well-dressed” boy, and a Sunday-school scholar, and therefore the chances are that his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people, with just enough natural villainy in their composition to make them yearn after the daily papers, and enjoy them; and so this boy had opportunities to learn all through the week how to do right, as well as on Sunday.

It was in this way that he found out that the great commonwealth of California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and allows Patrick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing—­probably because the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt cannot exist without it.

It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the tax-gatherers—­it would be unkind to say all of them—­collect the tax twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to discourage Chinese immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much applauded, and likewise regarded as being singularly facetious.

It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a sluice-box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese, Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, etc., etc.), they make him leave the camp; and when a Chinaman does that thing, they hang him.

It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of justice in the hearts of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is committed, they say, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” and go straightway and swing a Chinaman.

It was in this way that he found out that by studying one half of each day’s “local items,” it would appear that the police of San Francisco were either asleep or dead, and by studying the other half it would seem that the reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the virtue, the high effectiveness, and the dare-devil intrepidity of that very police-making exultant mention of how “the Argus-eyed officer So-and-so” captured a wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison; and how “the gallant officer Such-and-such-a-one” quietly kept an eye on the