Daily Los Angeles herald., 1882-05-17
TINE CHINESE CURSE.
Graphic Picture by an Eastern Wis.,
itor-Debasing Effect of Cheap
Labor Competition on the Rising
Generation.

Hon. J. P. Irish, editor of the Ioaoa
State Press, who visited California a
few weeks ago, and who spent some
days in Los Angeles ON his way home,
in letter to his paper gives the follow
ing graphic description of the Mongolian
curse as he saw it at San Francisco and
of the debasing effect of Chinese cheap
labor competition on the rising genera
ton of that city:
Thought that chinatown, in Frisco,
was low-lying tract covered with
thatched shanties, but it is in one of the
finest quarters of the city, which was
solidly built with business houses and
sheltered thousands of white laborers.
When the cancer was SMALL in the days
when they were hailed as desirable ad-
dition to the laboring population, they
rented here. Others came and rented.
Soon it became more pleasant for their
white neighbors to rent to them and
move, than to stay in range of their
noisome habits. So step by step, pay
| ing at first high rates on short leases
they covered many blocks. As the leases
expired no white man would take the
property and the owners were compelled
| to rent to Chinese at their own rates or
lose all income. By this process the
district was conquested. Now it is ex-
tending around its borders, property
across the street is undesirable for whites
and the Mongols take it. Near forty
thousand of them are in this district. II
| is to all intents and purposes Chinese
city; here are their stores, their facto.
ries, their temples, their nautch houses.
Now remember that this population OF
40, 900 has in it not a dozen wives, not a
dozen families Forty thousand white
laborers would represent l6O, 600 popula.
ton. Here every woman is unclean
She has no children. She is passion
slave, sold at birth to infamy and train
ed from her lisp to vice as white mer
train their daughters to virtue ! These
men cook their food, tend their own fou,
sleeping places and live on twenty dol
lars year.
We make o travesty of '"Chinest
cheap labor" Here is q tragedy. Along
side of this wifeless, childless, Christles'
labor, the white toiler, with his wife ant
weans,. competes in vain. My readers
may have heard of the Hoodlum of SaI
Francisco. He is victim of the cancer
He is the son of a white laborer whit
was guttered in the unequal contest
his sons missed their schooling and a
working age had to compete with Chi
nese labor. The competition was impos
sible. They fell into vice. The whit
laborer's daughters have not thing t.
which they can turn to honestly earn
living. The young men who in the ma
tural course would wife them and max
, them homes, are in the jails, the peni
tentiary, the gutter, the gambling house
So the girls feet take hold on perditiol
and they carry their bodies to market +
J meet the Chinese woman and compel
with her in the foot-race to hell. So tn
white laboring class is fostering out
livid with the leprosy of this Chimes
curse, rotting with the cancer whic
grows and thrives as they decay.
This is q sketch of the effects of Mon
D golian labor on this coast. Anothe
time will traverse the details and r.
veal the steps by which such conclt
sions follow. have underdrawn tn
picture. 1t is not colored.