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.