Round the World | Page 7

and one another. The doctor (a real canny Scot, who sings "My Nannie's awa'" like Wilson) was over the rail and down the hold in a moment. I ran to Captain Meyer's room on the upper deck and roused him. He too was down and in the hold like a flash--brave fellows that they are, these "true British sailors." I waited the result, knowing that if fire had really started, a general stampede of Chinamen would soon come from the hatches; but all was still. How long those few moments seemed! In a short time the captain returned, looking, in his night-clothes, like a ghost. One of the crazy men had broken loose from his chains, and the Chinamen were panic-stricken. The watchman wanted the most startling alarm, and found it, undoubtedly, in that word fire. It is all over; but when he next has to sound an alarm let him "take any form but that."
We have a reverend missionary and wife, with two young lady missionaries in embryo, who are on their way to begin their labors among the Chinese. They are busily engaged learning the language. Poor girls! what a life they have before them! But apart from all question of its true usefulness, they have the grand thought to sustain them, and ennoble their lives, that they go at the call of what seems to them their duty. We watch the Chinese eating and laugh at their chopsticks, but we forget that one reason why John Chinaman prides himself upon being at the pinnacle of civilization is that he uses these very chopsticks. (None of the races of Asia, and until recently he knew no other, have ever got beyond chopsticks, the use of which was first taught China, while most of them don't even have them yet.) Let us not forget that our ancestors were using their fingers--barbarians that they were--when the Chinese had risen, centuries before, to the refinement of these sticks, for the fork is only about three hundred years old. Shakespeare probably, Spenser certainly, had only a knife at his girdle to carve the meat he ate, the fingers being important auxiliaries. We must be modest upon this chopstick question. It costs the ship eleven cents (5-1/2 d.) per day a head to feed these people, and this pays for a wholesome diet in great abundance, much beyond what they are accustomed to.
While on the subject of the Chinaman I may note that of course we did not get through California without hearing the Chinese problem warmly discussed. It is the burning question just now upon the Pacific coast, but it seems to me our Californians' fears are, as Colonel Diehl would put it, "slightly previous." There are only about 130,000 Chinese in America, and great numbers are returning as the result of hard times, and I fear harder treatment. There is no indication that we are to be overrun by them, and until they change their religious ideas and come to California to marry, settle, die, and be buried there, it is preposterous to believe there is any thing in the agitation against them beyond the usual prejudice of the ignorant races next to them in the social scale.
I met the owner of a quicksilver mine, whose remarks shed a flood of light upon the matter. The mine yields a lean ore, and did not pay when worked by white labor costing $2 to $2.50 per day. He contracted with a Chinaman to furnish 170 men at one-half these rates. They work well, doing as much per man as the white man can do in this climate. He has no trouble with them--no fights, no sprees, no strikes. The difference in the cost enables him to work at a profit a mine which otherwise would be idle; and to such as talk against Chinese labor in the neighborhood, he replies, "Very well, drive it off if you please, but the mine stops if you do." The benefit to the district of having a mine actively at work has so far insured protection. This is the whole story. Our free American citizen from Tipperary and the restless rowdy of home growth find a rival beating them in the race, and instead of taking the lesson to heart and practising the virtues which cause the Chinaman to excel, they mount the rostrum and proclaim that this is a "white man's country," and "down with the nigger and the Heathen Chinee," and "three cheers for whiskey and a free fight!" The Chinese question has not reached a stage requiring legislation, nor, if let alone, will it do so for centuries to come--and not then unless the Chinese change their religious ideas, which they have not done for thousands of years, and are not likely to