Sketches New and Old


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Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to  
stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is  
punished for it--he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one  
of the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery,  
is to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan  
Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for  
their lives.  
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-[I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present  
of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs  
on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his  
head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the  
hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down  
his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a  
more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in  
the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to  
publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that  
subscribed for the paper.]  
Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire "Pacific  
coast" gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the  
virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco  
proclaim (as they have lately done) that "The police are positively  
ordered to arrest all boys, of every description and wherever found, who  
engage in assaulting Chinamen."  
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Page
139 140 141 142 143

Quick Jump
1 101 201 302 402