, the former as a fisherman, the latter as
well as the former as a duck-shooter. President McKinley has no taste
for sport, but the Vice-President is a promoter of sport of each and
every kind. He is at home in polo or hurdle racing, with the rifle or
revolver. This calls to mind the national weapon--the revolver.
Nine-tenths of all the shooting is done with this weapon, that is
carried in a special pocket on the hips, and I venture to say that a
pair of "trousers" was never made without the pistol pocket. Even the
clergymen have one. I asked an Episcopal clergyman why he had a pistol
pocket. He replied that he carried his prayer-book there. The Southern
people use a long curved knife, called a bowie, after its inventor. Many
people have been cut by this weapon. The negro, for some strange reason,
carries a razor, and in a fight "whips out" this awful weapon and
slashes his enemy. I have asked many negroes to explain this habit or
selection. One replied that it was "none of my d---- business." Nearly
all the others said they did not know why they carried it.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CHINAMAN IN AMERICA

The average Irishman whom one meets in America, and he is legion, is a
very different person from the polished gentleman I have met in Belfast,
Dublin, and other cities in Ireland; but I never heard that the American
Irishman, the product of an ignorant peasantry crowded out of Ireland,
had been accepted as a type of the race. Peculiar discrimination is made
in America against the Chinese. Our lower classes, "coolies" from the
Cantonese districts, have flocked to America. Americans "lump" all
Chinese under this head, and can not conceive that in China there are
cultivated men, just as there are cultivated men in Ireland, the
antipodes of the grotesque Irish types seen in America.

I believe there are seventy-five or eighty thousand Chinamen in America.
They do not assimilate with the Americans. Many are common laborers,
laundrymen, and small merchants. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco,
and other cities there are large settlements of them. In San Francisco
many have acquired wealth. The Chinese quarter is to all intents and
purposes a Chinese city. None of these people, or very few, are
Americanized in the sense of taking an active part in the government;
Americans do not permit it. I was told that the Chinese were among the
best citizens, the percentage of criminals being very small. They are
honest, frugal, and