CHAPTER V.
THE CHINESE AS LABORERS AND PRODUCERS.
As I crossed from Oakland to San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon last July, there were on the ferry-boat a number of Chinese.

They were decently clad, quiet, clean, sat apart in their places in the lower part of the boat conversing together, and finally walked off the boat when she came to land as orderly as though they had been Massachusetts Christians.
There were also on the boat a number of half-grown and full-grown white boys, some of whom had been fishing, and carried their long rods with them.

These were slouchy, dirty, loud-voiced, rude; and, as they passed off the boat, I noticed that with their long rods they knocked the hats of the Chinese off their heads, or punched them in the back, every effort of this kind being rewarded with boisterous laughter from their companions.
Nor did they confine their annoyance entirely to the Chinese, for they jostled and pushed their way out through the crowd of men and women very much as a gang of pickpockets on a Third Avenue car in New York conducts itself when its members mean to steal a watch or two.
These rowdies were "Hoodlums;" and it is the Hoodlums chiefly who clamor about the Chinese, and who are "ruined by Chinese cheap labor." The anti-Chinese agitation in San Francisco has led me to look a little closely into this matter, and I declare my belief that there are not a hundred decent men who work for a living in that city engaged in this crusade against the Chinese.

If you could to-day assemble there all who join in this persecution, and if then you took from this assemblage all the Hoodlums, all the bar-room loafers, and all the political demagogues, I don't believe you would have a hundred men left on the ground.

That is to say, the people who actually earn the bread they eat do not persecute the Chinese.
If an Eastern reader suggests that it argues a lack of public spirit in the decent part of the community to allow the roughs to rule in this matter, I take leave to remind him of the time, not very long ago, when the same combination of Hoodlum and demagogue mobbed negroes in New York, and threatened vengeance if colored people were allowed to ride in the street-cars.