Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/199

Rh of the town. Its natural advantages made it the choice of the early American settlers, and as such it would doubtless have remained to-day had it not been for the advent of the Chinese. These latter, seeing also its advantages, located themselves there. As they increased in numbers, Christian civilization with instinctive repugnance retreated before them, until, within this entire district, once literally San Francisco itself, there is not a vestige of American civilization remaining save in the abandoned homes, churches, and other private and public buildings, each one of which fairly swarms with hordes of unclean and unsavory Chinese. A missionary writer, the Rev. Mr. Gibson, an advocate of Chinese immigration for Christianizing purposes, tells the story in his book, "The Chinese in America," of the abandonment of the "First Baptist Church" in San Francisco to the Chinese:

"What was lately the First Baptist Church of San Francisco is now a crowded Chinese tenement-house, full of all manner of filthiness, shame, and sin. Where but lately was the altar of the living God, now smokes the incense of idolatry. That sacred temple, where once the voice of prayer and praise to God was heard, now echoes with idolatrous chants and bacchanalian songs. Instead of standing firm against the incoming hosts of idolatry and sin, the Church of Christ has beaten an ignominious retreat, has surrendered without a struggle one of the strongest fortifications and retreated in disorder before the advancing hosts of idolatry." Thus, here as elsewhere, they have established their supremacy, defied all laws for their government and the suppression of their vices/and erected themselves into an imperium in imperio, conquering and still to conquer.

If the further coming of this race be successfully prevented, it will probably be contended that, among the new generations which are to be born here, and which will be entitled to all the rights and privileges of American citizenship by reason of that fact, the influences of Christian civilization will be so powerful as to obliterate race habits and vices, and substitute those of our own race for their own. There has been no test of this under these special conditions, and therefore there can be nothing foretold with precision in regard to it. We can not lose sight of the fact, however, that the children born of Chinese parents in San Francisco so far are as distinctly Chinese in race, habits, superstitions, vices, and costume as were their fathers before them. Thus far there has not been a perceptible change in them. As in every other country where they have colonized the same results have followed, why should we look for different results here? It will be said that they are quick to learn, and capable of excelling in all classes of skilled labor, and therefore they should be equally responsive in exchanging their race habits and civilization for our own.