“Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not
love me if I do not stone him.”
And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.
Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high
and holy thing to stone a Chinaman, and yet he no
sooner attempts to do his duty than he is punished
for it—he, poor chap, who has been aware
all his life that one of the principal recreations
of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery, is to
look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers
of Brannan Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen,
and make them flee for their lives.
—[I have many such memories in my mind,
but am thinking just at present of one particular
one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs
on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket
of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mutilated
his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the
occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman’s teeth
down his throat with half a brick. This incident
sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity,
perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the
employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and
was not allowed to publish it because it might offend
some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the
paper.]
Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which
the entire “Pacific coast” gives its youth,
there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the virtuous
flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco
proclaim (as they have lately done) that “The
police are positively ordered to arrest all boys,
of every description and wherever found, who engage
in assaulting Chinamen.”
Still, let us be truly glad they have made the order,
notwithstanding its inconsistency; and let us rest
perfectly confident the police are glad, too.
Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys,
provided they be of the small kind, and the reporters
will have to laud their performances just as loyally
as ever, or go without items.
The new form for local items in San Francisco will
now be: “The ever-vigilant and efficient
officer So-and-so succeeded, yesterday afternoon,
in arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined
resistance,” etc., etc., followed by
the customary statistics and final hurrah, with its
unconscious sarcasm: “We are happy in being
able to state that this is the forty-seventh boy arrested
by this gallant officer since the new ordinance went
into effect. The most extraordinary activity
prevails in the police department. Nothing like
it has been seen since we can remember.”
