rs the accusation. I am told, again, that they are
of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and
dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what
remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the
industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at
home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is
the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to
immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and
resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he
loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a
vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring for arms and butchery. "At the call of Abreham Lincoln," said
the orator, "ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can
ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians?"

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and
a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walked the earth
with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the
clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so
old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this
travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and
mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that
way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design,
beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us
turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity
must there not ha