dollars for the entrance of
this one and had them married on the spot. Whenever there is the
slightest doubt about their being married, we take no chances, charge
them five hundred dollars and have the knot tied right here and now.
Then the man has to treat the woman as a wife and support her; or she can
sue him; and we can punish and deport him. There is no more of little
girls being brought in to be sold for slavery and worse."

All the same, some evils of the boss system still exist. The boss system
taught the Chinaman organization, and to-day, even with higher wages,
your forty-five dollars a month cook will do no gardening. You ask him
why. "They will cut my throat," he tells you; and if he goes out to mow
the lawn, he is soon surrounded by fellow countrymen who hoot and jeer
him.

"Would they cut his throat?" I asked a Chinaman.

"No; but maybe, the benevolent association or his tong fine him."

So you see why labor no longer fears the Chinaman and welcomes him to
industrial unionism, a revolution in the attitude of labor which has
taken place in the last year. Make a note of these facts:

The poll tax has trebled expenses for the householder.

The poll tax has created industrial unionism among the Chinese.

The poll tax has not kept the Chinaman out.

How about the Chinese vices? Are they a stench to Heaven as the Hindu's?
I can testify that they certainly are not open, and they certainly are
not aggressive, and they certainly do not claim vice as a right; for I
went through Vancouver's Chinatown with only a Chinaman as an escort (not
through "underground dens," as one paper reported it) after ten at night;
and the vices that I saw were innocent, mild, pallid, compared to the
white-man vices of Little Italy, New York, or Upper Broadway. We must
have visited in all a dozen gambling joints, two or three midnight
restaurants, half a dozen opium places and two theaters; and the only
thing that could be remotely constructed into disrespect was the
amazement on one drunken white face on the street that a white woman
could be going through Chinatown with a Chinaman. Instead of playing for
ten and one hundred dollars, as white men and women gamble up-town, the
Chinese boys were huddling intently over dice boxes, or playing fan-tan
with fevered zeal for ten cents. Instead of drinking absinthe, one or
two sat smoking heavily, with the abstracted stare of the opium victim.
In the midnight restaurants some