Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0149/01498.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 8KB | 152 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01498}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sketches, Old And New
Disgraceful Persecution Of A Boy}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{boy
chinaman
found
francisco
san
way
how
officer
police
chinamen}
$Date{1893}
$Log{}
Title:       Sketches, Old And New
Book:        Disgraceful Persecution Of A Boy
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1893

Disgraceful Persecution Of A Boy

     In San Francisco, the other day, "A well-dressed boy, on his way to
Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning
Chinamen." What a commentary is this upon human justice!  What sad prominence
it gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak! San Francisco
has little right to take credit to herself for her treatment of this poor boy.
What had the child's education been?  How should he suppose it was wrong to
stone a Chinaman?  Before we side against him, along with outraged San
Francisco, let us give him a chance - let us hear the testimony for the
defence.

     He was a "well-dressed" boy, and a Sunday-school scholar, and therefore,
the chances are that his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people, with
just enough natural villainly in their composition to make them yearn after
the daily papers, and enjoy them; and so this boy had opportunities to learn
all through the week how to do right, as well as on Sunday.

     It was in this way that he found out that the great commonwealth of
California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and allows
Patrick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing - probably because the degraded
Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt cannot exist without
it.

     It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the
tax-gatherers - it would be unkind to say all of them - collect the taxes
twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to discourage
Chinese immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much applauded, and
likewise regarded as singularly facetious.

     It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a
sluice-box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese,
Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, &c., &c.), they make him leave the
camp; and when a Chinaman does that thing, they hang him.

     It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast
Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free-love of justice in the hearts of
the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is committed, they
say, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," and go straightway and
swing a Chinaman.

     It was in this way that he found out that by studying one half of each
day's "local items," it would appear that the police of San Francisco were
either asleep or dead, and by studying the other half it would seem that the
reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the virtue, the high
effectiveness, and the dare-devil intrepidity of that very police - making
exultant mention of how "the Argus-eyed officer So-and-so," captured a
wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing chickens, and brought him
gloriously to the city prison; and how "the gallant officer Such-and-such-
a-one," quietly kept an eye on the movements of an "unsuspecting, almond- eyed
son of Confucius" (your reporter is nothing if not facetious), following him
around with that far-off look of vacancy and unconsciousness always so finely
affected by that inscrutible being, the forty-dollar policeman, during a
waking interval, and captured him at last in the very act of placing his hands
in a suspicious manner upon a paper of tacks, left by the owner in an exposed
situation; and how one officer performed this prodigious thing, and another
officer that, and another the other - and pretty much every one of these
performances having for a dazzling central incident a Chinaman guilty of a
shilling's worth of crime, an unfortunate, whose misdemeanor must be hurraed
into something enormous in order to keep the public from noticing how many
really important rascals went uncaptured in the meantime, and how overrated
those glorified policemen actually are.

     It was in this way that the boy found out that the Legislature, being
aware that the Constitution has made America an asylum for the poor and the
oppressed of all nations, and that, therefore the poor and oppressed who fly
to our shelter must not be charged a disabling admission fee, made a law that
every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and pay to
the State's appointed officer ten dollars for the service, when there are
plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it for him
for fifty cents.

     It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights
that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man was
bound to pity, that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the purchase of
a penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody loved Chinamen, that
nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it was convenient to
inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State
itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers.

     And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this sunny-
hearted boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming with
freshly-learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself -

     "Ah, there goes a Chinaman!  God will not love me if I do not stone him."

     And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.

     Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to
stone a Chinamen, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is
punished for it - he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one of
the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery, is to
look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan Street set their
dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives. ^*

[Footnote *: I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at
present of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their
dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his
head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity
of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down his throat with
half a brick.  This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent
tenacity perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the employ of a San
Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it
might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper.]

     Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire "Pacific
coast" gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the
virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco proclaim
(as they have lately done) that "The police are positively ordered to arrest
all boys of every description and wherever found, who engage in assaulting
Chinamen."

     Still, let us be truly glad they have made order, notwithstanding its
inconsistency; and let us rest perfectly confident that the police are glad,
too.  Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they be
of the small kind, and the reporters will have to laud their performances just
as loyally as ever, or go without items.

     The new form for local items in San Francisco will now be: - "The ever
vigilent and efficient officer So-and-So succeeded, yesterday afternoon, in
arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined resistance," etc., etc.,
followed by the customary statistics and final hurrah, with its unconscious
sarcasm: "We are happy in being able to state that this is the forty- seventh
boy arrested by this gallant officer since the new ordinance went into effect.
The most extraordinary activity prevails in the police department.  Nothing
like it has been seen since we can remember."