[ UNION DEPOT.]

In the '70's there sprang up in San Francisco a tremendous excitement over the silver mines on the Comstock Lode. The bonanza was estimated to be worth over fifteen hundred millions of dollars. True, this argent field was across the Sierras, in the State of Nevada. But most of the output found its way to San Francisco. The principal owners lived there, and San Francisco was the depot for Comstock supplies. The Stock Board operated there, and stocks bought for less than one hundred thousand dollars soared up to two hundred million. At the highest notch of prices the manipulators sold out, and the airy fabric of speculation fell with a crash. The banks had been emptied by speculators eager to buy stocks, and were greatly embarrassed. Myriads were swept into poverty, leaving immense fortunes in the hands of a few.

Soon after the Comstock collapse the Sand Lot agitation sprang into life. Over one hundred and fifty millions of dollars had been removed from circulation by the Comstock jugglery. The wealth of the outside world was temporarily diverted from the San Francisco markets. A great drought had been on the State during two years and the lean kine had devoured the fat. Harvests were sparse or wholly lacking. Cattle perished beside the dry watercourses. A large body of the outside unemployed had come to swell the tide of the city's drifting, workless ones. The railroad was threatening a reduction of wages to its thousands of men. Riots were on in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, and had sent contagion on the enforced idlers in San Francisco. Feeling long smouldering broke into fire against the Chinese and the railroad, two factors believed by the working-men to be largely instrumental in cheapening wages and robbing men of work. A mob gathered, threatening to rout out the Asiatics. The police could not disperse the rioters.

[ CHINESE PHARMACY.]

On July 24th there came a third call for the Vigilance Committee to assemble, which many thought an unnecessary and high-handed summons. William T. Coleman was for a third time given charge. The Committee was to proceed upon lines followed in the '50's. But this time they were to co-operate with the authorities rather than to work in opposition. On July 25th, the mob, infuriated by the menace of the Committee and looking on it as a mere support of capitalistic interests, gathered about the Pacific Mail Dock, where immigrant Chinese were landed. The Committee, armed with pick-handles, met the labor mob at the dock and a few men were killed. This ended the uprising. But the issue was soon thrust into politics. The anti-Chinese believers gathered upon the sand lots in the neighborhood of the City Hall and organized the Working-man's Party. It spread throughout the State. Dennis Kearny, an illiterate but rudely eloquent speaker, became the leader, the Wat Tyler of the hour. The movement ended in the adoption by the State of a new Constitution framed along progressive lines.

The people of San Francisco are of all kindreds and tongues. Buddha, Mahomet, and Confucius are prayed to beside the Christian temples. The Indians of the Mission have faded from the peninsula and the sombreroed Spaniard dashes no more from the Mission to the beach about his bull-fights and bear-baitings. But here are Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Celts, Greeks, Slavs, Latins, Hindus, Chinese, Kanakas, Japanese, and Chilenos, all mixing in the great crucible and slowly shaping a new type of man, the Western American. All seem to be mixing, it should be explained, except the Chinese, for, after a quarter of a century of experience, San Francisco feels that her Chinese population is still an alien body and sure to remain so even to the third and fourth generation.

[ CHINESE GROCERY STORE.]

The problem of Chinese immigration has come up again and again in San Francisco. In 1869 the Chinese were invited and welcomed from China. In 1892, the Geary law was passed prohibiting the coming of any but the student class and providing for deportation under certain conditions. A generation grew up between this hail and farewell, China in the meantime pouring her tens of thousands of coolies into San Francisco. California welcomes any race that affiliates. But she has found that the Chinese race is not as the impressionable Indian or negro; but is an arrested race in the yoke of caste and ancient tradition, one looking with contempt upon upstart Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Chinese swarmed into a quarter of the city about Portsmouth Square, and have made there a small, evil-smelling Canton, where only a foreign tongue is spoken, and where strange gods are worshipped. Few have brought wives. Slave girls are the only women. Every Chinese prays to die in China, or to have his bones rot there. American law to most of them is but a pestilent thing to be evaded. They have no interest in the growth of the country or its institutions. They work for starvation wages, their living being extremely cheap, requiring only tea and rice and a bare shelf to sleep upon in a room crowded with such shelves. Being imitative, and as patient as cattle, and withal so cheap as hirelings, they have taken the places of women in the household and factory and the places of men and boys in the work of dock and shop and field. The assertion that this labor liberates the whites for higher work does not seem to be verified. Many trace the vicious "hoodlum" class of both sexes to the enforced idleness of these young people, springing from the iron competition of the Chinese in the labor market.

[ SMOKING ROOM, CHINESE RESTAURANT.]

Notwithstanding all this, the little slant-eyed men with their grotesque superstitions, their stiff, stark, unhomelike homes, add a quaintness and a touch of color to this romantic city. Gay placards of intense greens and vermilions flutter from their doorposts. Under the dull outer tunics of the elders gleam surtouts of gay brocades, while the few children, little faithful copies of their sires, all tricked out like the lanterns of the night, go toddling on tiny, rocking shoes through the narrow, dingy streets. The Chinese theatres, temples, and restaurants are full of the Oriental strangeness. The interiors of some of them are lacquered and varnished like huge tea-boxes.