nese can live more cheaply than Europeans, and are satisfied with smaller profits.
They are our gardeners, shopkeepers, carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, sailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, fishermen and washermen. All the mills employ Chinese coolies; all cargo-boats for loading and unloading ships are manned by these coolies. Europeans prefer the Chinese for servants: they are cleanly and quick to learn, frugal in their habits, utilizing everything. In the possession of all these traits they stand alone amidst surrounding tribes.
But the curse of opium-smoking and shamshu-drinking has followed them to this sunny land, and makes shipwreck of many thousands of lives annually. When they once become addicted to the use of opium they neglect their business and families and spend every cent they can find or steal for the poisonous drug, and finally, in a crazed state, their bodies mere skeletons, they lie down and die or put an end to their own lives.
Change of climate, scene and associations has no appreciable effect on the disposition of a Chinaman. He still retains his acquisitive, irascible and turbulent temperament. The Chinese herd together in little rooms, perhaps a score of them eating, working and sleeping in one little room in which a white man would die of suffocation. They are very clannish too, the natives of each province holding together and working to
