A MOST ATROCIOUS CRIMINAL.

Marlborough Daily Times, Volume II, Issue 144, 6 August 1880, Page 1 (Supplement)

A MOST ATROCIOUS CRIMINAL.

The anti-Chinese feeling is forcibly expressed in a speech made two years since by Mr. Sargent in the Senate of the United States. ‘The Chinese,’ remarked the orator, ‘ work for -wages that will not support the family of a white labourer, while the Chinese themselves are more than well fed on a handful of rice, a little refuse pork and decayed fish, costing but a few cents a dav, and, lodged in a pigstye, they become alllunnt according to their standard on wages that would beggar an American.’ And an able American essayist, Mr. J. Doc, discoursing on Chinese immigration in the ‘North American Review,’ remarks with caustic felicity, if with scant philanthropliy, of poor John Chinaman, that it is precisely his ‘ revolting characteristics’ which make him formidable in the contest for survival with other races of men. His miserable little figure, bis pinched and wretched way of living, his slavish and tireless industry, his indifference to high and costly pleasures which our civilisation almost makes necessities, his capacity to live in wretched dens in which the whiteman would rot if he did not suffocate’—these, according to the writer in the ‘ North American Review,’ are among the ‘revolting characteristics’ of tbe Heathen Chinee. According to Mr. Dei’s showing, it is possible—paradoxical as it may appear —for frugality, abstemiousness, patient industry and ingenuity, and a capacity for ‘ roughing ’ it to be positively crimes against modern Caucasian civilisation. From this point of view John Chinaman in California is assuredly a most atrocious criminal. It is a crime to be recorded against him that, in the long warfare of his race for the means of existence, his physical character has become adapted to the very smallest needs of human exis'ence, and with a capacity for the severest toil. It is criminal in him to be a man of iron, whom neither heat nor cold seems to affect, and of that machine-like calibre which never 1 ires. It is an additional piece of criminality on his part that ‘his range of food is the widest known among animals—embracing; as it does,- the whole vegetable kingdom, and including every beast of the earth and creeping thing, and all creatures of the sen, from the tiny shrimp to the leviathan of the deep.’ Miserable criminal, abandoned, and depraved John Chinaman, who can subsist on anything and almost on nothing. He is clcnil , in American opinion, out of place in a land overflowing with milk and honey, with tender loin steak and little neck clams, with sweet potatoes and sugar-cured hams, with scrambled eggs and buckwheat cakes, with hog, hominy, striped turkey, and terrapin.— G. A. Sala in ‘Telegraph.’

When ft young lady tripped into a music shop the other day aud asketl the bashful clerk ;in attendance for ‘Two Kisses,’ he j a mined on his hat and rushed out of the back door. The clerk, never having heard of the peece of music, thought lie was the victim of a leap year proposal, and his salary was not large enough to support two. ( Old Joe Hemlock, one of the blackes coloured men in Detroit, was promenading through the editorial rooms of the • rre Tress, in search of mouey enough to buy a new pair of boots, and the sight of him revealed an old recollection. In ISfil, after the retreat from Bull Ilun, the Third Michigan Infantry went into camp at Hunter'splace, and old Joe, then a middle-aged darkey, came in'o camp as a runaway. Colonel M ‘Connel seized upon him for a cook, and after instruction Joe was given charge of the Colonel’s kitchen. His first meal was dinner* and about time for it to appear lie walked in on the Colonel, made a very low bow, and said : ‘ Kernel, I’ze not quite up to the situation jist yet. You tole me to bake beans, didn’t you?’ ‘I did. ’ ‘ Werry well, sah; tie beans am baked. You tole mo to fry ham didn’t you?’ ‘I did.’ ‘ Worry well, sah ; de ham am fried. Now did you say I wore to bile de coffee in the kernel, or,—’ ‘No—iio—who ever heard of making coffee that way ?’ ’ ‘ Well, dat’s what I tought; but Kernel, it am an awful slow job for one rigger to crack all dat coffee ’tween his teef, tud dinner’s gwino to bo half an hour late, mail’s yoer bo’n.’