Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/451

Rh her bay is spoken of as "the bay," and she is not merely the greatest city, but "the city."

And, though the European element is largely represented in San Francisco, it is, I am inclined to think, more thoroughly Americanized than in the Eastern cities. The reason I take to be, not merely that it is drawn from the more active and intelligent of the immigration that sets upon the Atlantic shore, and has generally only reached California after a longer or shorter sojourn in more Eastern States, but also that the American population having been drawn from all sections of the country, and from the early days the whole immigration having been rather of individuals than of colonies or families, the admixture has been more thorough, and, except as to the Chinese, that polarization which divides a mixed population into distinct communities has not so readily taken place.

Contrary, too, to the reputation which she seems to have got, San Francisco is really an orderly city. Although the police force has been doubled within the past two years, it still bears a smaller proportion to population than in other large American cities. Chinamen go about the streets with far more security than I imagine they will go about any Eastern city when they become proportionately as numerous; and, after all said of hoodlumism, there is little obtrusive rowdyism and few street fights—a fact which may in part result from the once universal practice of carrying arms.

Nor has communism or socialism (understanding by these terms the desire for fundamental social changes) made, up to this time, much progress in California, for the presence of the Chinese has largely engrossed the attention of the laboring classes, offering what has seemed to them a sufficient explanation of the fall of wages and difficulty of finding employment. Only the more thoughtful have heeded the fact that in other parts of the world where there are no Chinamen the condition of the laboring classes is even worse than in California. With the masses the obvious evils of Chinese competition have excluded all thought of anything else. And in this anti-Chinese feeling there is, of course, nothing that can properly be deemed socialistic or communistic. On the contrary, socialists and communists are more tolerant of the Chinese than any other class of those who feel or are threatened by their competition. For not only is there, at the bottom of what is called socialism and communism, the great idea of the equality and brotherhood of men, but they who look to changes in the fundamental institutions of society as the only means for improving the condition of the masses necessarily regard Chinese immigration as a minor evil, if in a proper social state it could be any evil at all. Nor is there in this anti-Chinese feeling anything essentially foreign. Those who talk about opposition to the Chinese being anti-American shut their eyes to a great many facts if they mean anything more than that it ought to be anti-American.