tertain the weak, and despitefully to treat the poor is no part of Anglo-American character. I have yet to find the first instance where atrocities upon the Chinese were not condemned by the community, by ninetenths of them, and by those who opposed by every fair and humane means the presence of Asiatics in our midst. Accursed be the day that made from the distempered slums of European cess-pools the first American citizen, and gave him power so to influence for evil our politics !
Prominent among the outrages in California upon the Chinese are those at Los Angeles in 1871, and in Chico in 1877. There are thousands of minor impositions, from the stoning of a pig-tail by school boys, to the massacre of a Chinese mining-camp by badblooded diggers, many of which I have given elsewhere, but most of which were unrecorded, save by the aveng^ingf an<j:;el. Yet these two instances illusirate the extreme to which this spoliation has been carried in California.
Negro Alley was the Barbary Coast or Chinatown of Los Angeles. The alley itself was a small street connecting this hotbed of human depravity with the business portion of the city. The two quarters, so near and yet so socially distant, were in marked contrast, as marked as the Five Points and Broadway, or as St Giles and Piccadilly ; old-fashioned, low, one-storied, whitewashed, tiled, windowless adobe buildings standing amidst filthy and unkept surroundings characterizing the one, and brick warehouses, banks, and gay shops the other. The denizens of Negro Alley comprised the dregs of the nations. Asiatic, African, and European, Latin and Indian there lived in unholy association, and for vocation followed thieving and murder. This was the nest, the city quarters of that large fraternity of crime that fed on southern California, Arizona, and northern Mexico. It was the rendezvous of bandit, burglar, petty thief, and gentlemanly highwayman, of men of all
