Greater Britain Part 15

Nowhere could be found greater spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier would make his fortune as a London pantaloon.

When the detectives could no longer contain their distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters for a restaurant--the "Hang Heong,"

the wood of which was brought from China.

The street along which we had to pa.s.s was decorated rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door; but the "Hang Heong" was brilliantly illuminated, with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they poured out from the theater at a later hour. The ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the dining-rooms being up stairs. The counter, which is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman, but by grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who received our order from the detective with the decorous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country inn.

The rooms up stairs were nearly full; and as the Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a pair of chopsticks were given each of us, but at our request a spoon was furnished as a special favor to the "Melicans."

Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before supper was brought up.

The liquor was a kind of shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes. For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish; tea was then brought in, and followed by shark's fin, for which I had given a special order; the result might have been gum arabic for any flavor I could find. Dog was not to be obtained, and birds'-nest soup was beyond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles from home, and twelve thousand from his next supplies. A dish of some strange, black fungus stewed in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded our supper, and were washed down by our third cups of tea.

After paying our respects and our money to the gentleman in black, who grunted a lugubrious something that answered to "good night," we paid a visit to the Chinese "bad quarter," which differs only in degree of badness from the "quartier Mexicain," the bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even by the prejudiced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilenos.

Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses just before they closed. Some difficulty was made about admitting us by the "yellow loafers" who hung around the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law; but as soon as the detectives, who were known, explained that they came not on business, but on pleasure, we were suffered to pa.s.s in among the silent, melancholy gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every now arid then a grunt from the croupier. Each man knew what he was about, and won or lost his money in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared to be a sort of loto; but a few minutes of it was enough, and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance with its principles.

The San Francisco Chinese are not all mere theater-goers, loafers, gamblers; as a body they are frugal, industrious, contented men. I soon grew to think it a pleasure to meet a Chinese-American, so clean and happy is his look: not a speck is to be seen upon the blue cloth of his long coat or baggy trowsers. His hair is combed with care; the bamboo on which he and his mate together carry their enormous load seems as though cleansed a dozen times a day.

It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they are all alike: no European can, without he has dealings with them, distinguish one Celestial from another. The same, however, may be said of the Sikhs, the Australian natives, of most colored races, in short. The points of difference which distinguish the yellow men, the red men, the black men with straight hair, the negroes, from any other race whatever, are so much more prominent than the minor distinctions between Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle Ned and Uncle Tom, that the individual are sunk and lost in the national distinctions. To the Chinese in turn all Europeans are alike; but beneath these obvious facts there lies a grain of solid truth that is worth the hunting out, and which is connected with the change-of-type question in America and Australasia. Men of similar habits of mind and body are alike among ourselves in Europe; noted instances are the close resemblance of Pere Enfantin, the St.

Simonian chief, to the busts of Epicurus; of Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes. Irish laborers--men who for the most part work hard, feed little, and leave their minds entirely unplowed--are all alike; Chinamen, who all work hard, and work alike, who live alike, and who go further, and all think alike, are, by a mere law of nature, indistinguishable one from the other.

In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City, I lighted on the house of the Canton Company, one of the Chinese benevolent societies, the others being those of Hong Kong, Macao, and Amoy. They are like the New York Immigration Commission, and the London "Societe Francaise de Bienfaisance," combined; added to a theater and joss-house, or temple, and governed on the principles of such clubs as those of the "whites" or "greens" at Heidelberg, they are, in short, Chinese trades unions, sheltering the sick, succoring the distressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving the immigrants from China when they land, and shipping their bones back to China, ticketed with name and address, when they die. "Hong Kong, with dead Chinamen," is said to be a common answer from outward-bounders to a hail from the guard-ship at the Golden Gate.

Some of the Chinese are wealthy: Tung Yu & Co., Chi Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Chy Lung & Co., stand high among the merchants of the Golden City. Honest and wealthy as these men are allowed to be, they are despised by every white Californian, from the governor of the State to the Mexican boy who cleans his shoes.

In America, as in Australia, there is a violent prejudice against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told; he lies, he is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of b.e.s.t.i.a.l vices--a pagan, and--what is far more important--yellow! All his sins are to be pardoned but the last.

Californians, when in good humor, will admit that John is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard working, that his clothes at least are scrupulously clean; but he is yellow! Even the Mexicans, themselves despised, look down upon the Chinamen, just as the New York Irish affect to have no dealings with "the naygurs." The Chinese themselves pander to the feeling. Their famous appeal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be true: "What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam Chinaman?

Chinaman allee samee Democlat; no likee n.i.g.g.e.r, no likee injun."

"Infernals," "Celestials," and "Greasers"--or black men, yellow men, and Mexicans--it is hard to say which are most despised by the American whites in California.

The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his cowardice. Had the Chinese stood to their rights against the Americans, they would long since have been driven from California. As it is, here and in Victoria they invariably give way, and never work at diggings which are occupied by whites. Yet in both countries they take out mining licenses from the State, which is bound to protect them in the possession of the rights thus gained, but which is powerless against the rioters of Ballarat, or the "Anti-Chinese mob" of El Dorado.

The Chinese in California are practically confined by public opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds of work, which the "meanest" of the whites of the Pacific States refuse to perform. Politically, this is slavery. All the evils to which slavery has given rise in the cotton States are produced here by violence, in a less degree only because the Chinese are fewer than were the negroes.

In spite of a prejudice which recalls the time when the British government forbade the American colonist to employ negroes in the manufacture of hats, on the ground that white laborers could not stand the compet.i.tion, the yellow men continue to flock to the "Gold Hills,"

as they call San Francisco. Already they are the washermen, sweepers, and porters of three States, two Territories, and British Columbia. They are denied civil rights; their word is not taken in cases where white men are concerned; a heavy tax is set upon them on their entry to the State; a second tax when they commence to mine--still their numbers steadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his message, recommended the prohibition of the immigration of the Chinese, but they now number one-tenth of the population.

The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to flow over on to the outer world. Who shall say where the flood will stop? Ireland, with now five millions of people, has, in twenty years, poured an equal number out into the world. What is to prevent the next fifty years seeing an emigration of a couple of hundreds of millions from the rebellion-torn provinces of Cathay?

Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as much arm-work as two Englishmen, and will eat or cost less. It looks as though the cheaper would starve out the dearer race, as rabbits drive out stronger but hungrier hares. This tendency is already plainly visible in our mercantile marine: the ships are manned with motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, Negroes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There are no British or American seamen now, except boys who are to be quartermasters some day, and experienced hands who are quartermasters already. But there is nothing to regret in this: Anglo-Saxons are too valuable to be used as ordinary seamen where lascars will do nearly, and Maories quite as well. Nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labor of the Eastern peoples.

The serious side of the Chinese problem--just touched on here--will force itself rudely upon our notice in Australia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY.--P. 228]

CHAPTER XXIV.

CALIFORNIA.

"In front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and grain."

The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by him in discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making forecasts of the future of California, we have to look more to her facilities for trade than to her natural productions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much the port of California as one of the main stations on the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe.

Although the chief claim of California to consideration is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and size alone ent.i.tle her to notice. This single State is 750 miles in length--would stretch from Chamouni to the southernmost point of Malta. There are two capes in California--one nearly in the lat.i.tude of Jerusalem, the other nearly in the lat.i.tude of Rome. The State has twice the area of Great Britain; the single valley of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to the great snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three kingdoms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile soil, every variety of helpful climate, are to be found within the State. There are in the Union forty-five such States or Territories, with an average area equal to that of Britain.

Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are three great tracts, each with its soil and character. On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold fields in which I spent my first week in California. Next comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly, where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the Contra Costa Range and the sea is a winterless strip, possessing for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the world. The story goes that Californian boys, when asked if they believe in a future state, reply: "Guess so; California."

[Ill.u.s.tration: EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.--P. 228.]

Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second Liverpool or New York is an all-absorbing question to those who live on the Pacific sh.o.r.es, and one not without an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best harbors on the coast of a country which exports enormously of breadstuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties of England. San Francis...o...b..y, as the best harbor south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the center of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, population will increase, manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles take the place of that of raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if, as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future of San Francisco, as the meeting point of the railways, and center of the import of manufactured goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder question. That it will be the converging point of the Pacific railroads, both of Chicago and St.

Louis, there can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from China and j.a.pan will pa.s.s through it seems as clear; it is the extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal terms with water carriage; but a.s.suming that, in the long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the overland route across Russia, and not that through the United States, that will convey the silks and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very arguments of which the Californian merchants make use to show that the delicate goods of China need land transport, go to prove that shipping and unshipping in the Pacific, and a repet.i.tion in the Atlantic of each process, cannot be good for them. The political importance to America of the Pacific railroads does not admit of overstatement; but the Russian or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English railway through Southern China, Upper India, the Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coa.r.s.er goods and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no case can the City of San Francis...o...b..come a western outpost of Europe.

The l.u.s.ter of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed by considerations such as these; as the port of entry for the trade of America, with all the East, its wealth must become enormous; and if, as is probable, j.a.pan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, London. This, however, is the more distant future. With cheaper labor than the Pacific States and the British colonies possess, with a more settled government than j.a.pan--Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pacific railroad is completed, will take, and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that from England, and there is every probability that Lancaster and Belgium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are of coal, become competent to make them. The merchants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China and j.a.pan. In this direction the future has no bounds: through California and the Sandwich Islands, through j.a.pan, fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is already British, our race seems marching westward to universal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its pa.s.sive strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever pushing with burning energy toward the setting sun. Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus; but long before they can meet there, they will be face to face upon the Amoor.

For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north: Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will probably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are pouring West from the bleak rocks of New England.

The Californian expedition of 1853 against Sonora and Lower California will be repeated with success, but the tide will be but momentarily stayed. So entirely are English countries now the motherlands of energy and adventure throughout the world, that no one who has watched what has happened in California, in British Columbia, and on the west coast of New Zealand, can doubt that the discovery of placer gold fields on any coast or in any sea-girt country in the world, must now be followed by the speedy rise there of an English government: were gold, for instance, found in surface diggings in j.a.pan, j.a.pan would be English in five years. We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian country on the Amoor, of j.a.pan, to be aware that such discoveries are more than likely to occur.

In the face of facts like these, men are to be found who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still probable--whether the Pacific States are not likely to secede from the Atlantic; some even contend for the general principle that "America must go to pieces--she is to big." It is small powers, not great ones, that have become impossible: the unification of Germany is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from London in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and San Francisco will in 1870 be nearer to each other than Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere size, there is more likelihood of England entering the Union than of California seceding from it.

The material interests of the Pacific States will always lie in union.

The West, sympathizing in the main with the Southerners upon the slavery question, threw herself into the war, and crushed them, because she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her own control. The same policy would hold good for the Pacific States in the case of the continental railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the future of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her interests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away. Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to be apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with ease, owing to the manner in which these States are commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebellion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be peculiarly the sailor's pa.s.sion: perhaps he loves his country because he sees so little of it.

The single danger that looms in the more distant future is the eventual control of Congress by the Irish, while the English retain their hold on the Pacific sh.o.r.es.

California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States--that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice--that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English inst.i.tutions on the world.

CHAPTER XXV.

MEXICO.

In company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand pa.s.sengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a "pile" to their homes in the Atlantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw "bolas" at the b.o.o.bies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way through the reefs off the lovely Island of Margarita, where the "Independence" was lost with three hundred human beings, we lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the "great Manilla ship"--the Acapulco galleon.

When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the "crocodile," describing the former under the latter's name; but at Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the smaller alligators; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to our ship's purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sailcloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port--one of the last of the holding-places through which the remnants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France.

In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen "hottest places in the world," we found two French frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told us that they landed their marines every morning after breakfast, and re-embarked them before sunset; they could get nothing from the sh.o.r.e but water; the Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and carried off even the fruit. When I asked about supplies, the answer was sweeping: "Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, cette _ssacrrreeee_ canaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. Nous n'avons que de l'eau fraiche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Mechicanos." When they granted us leave to land, it was with the proviso that we should not blame them if we were shot at by the Mexicans as we went ash.o.r.e, and by themselves as we came off again. Firing often takes place at night between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss in many months of only two men killed.

The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniversary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine's famous order of the day, directing the instant execution, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken by the French. It is a strange commentary upon the Marshal's circular that in a year from its issue the "Latin empire in America" should have had a term set to it by the President of the United States. In Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the English have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All Europe seems small when seen from the United States; but the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked on with some respect: France alone completely vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, "What does the Emperor say?" no one cares in the least what Napoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago paper I have seen a column of Washington news headed, "Seward orders _Lewis_ Napoleon to leave Mexico right away! Nap. lies badly to get out of the fix!"

While the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible of affront from England, and would never, if they conceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a Californian said to me, "Is it worth our while to set to work to whip her?" The effect of Gettysburg and Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or praises of Imperial France.

The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not been pointed out.