The Comstock Club

"Great God! Child that I was, I think in that moment I knew how the young mother feels, when in the curtained dimness of her room, she half fainting, hears the blissful whisper that unto her is born a son.

"There was the ensign of the land which held all joy in thought for us; which to us opened the gates of hope; that wondrous land in the air of which the pallid cheek of Want grows rosy red and Irish hearts cast off hereditary dispair.

"I rushed forward, where thray hundred imigrants were listlessly lounging about the deck, and, in mad excitement, shouted: 'See! See! It is the Amirican flag!' Just then the sunlight caught in its folds and turned it to gold.

"O, but thin there was a transformation sane. Ivery person on that deck sprang up and shouted. Men waved their hats and women embraced each other, and with a mighty 'All Hail' those Irish imigrants – Irish no longer, but henceforth forever to be Amiricans – greeted that flag. In response the marines manned the yards, and off to us across the wathers came the first ringing Amirican chare that we had iver heard. We answered back with a yell like that which might have been awakened at Babel. It was not a disciplined chare, but simply a wild cry of joy, and it was none the less hearty that over us swung haughtily the red cross of St. George.

"You native Amiricans are like spiled children, that niver having known an unsatisfied want, surfeit on dainties."

Corrigan relapsed into silence, but his eyes were glistening and there was a tremble about his lips. His mind was still in the burial place, where "memory was calling up its dead."

While the spell of Barney's words was still upon the Club, Yap Sing softly opened the door and announced that the evening luncheon was ready. The heathen had inaugurated these luncheons on the first day of his coming. They were at once accepted and had become a regular thing. Seeing that they were received approvingly, Yap had exhausted every device to make them a marked feature of the Club.

On this occasion the table was fully set, but there was no food on the table. Beside each plate stood a glass of water and a dish of salt. When the company was seated, Yap went to the cooking range, took out and set upon the table an immense platter which was piled high with huge baked potatoes, after which, with a face utterly destitute of expression, he went to his bench in the corner of the room and sat down.

Wright, who was nearest him, said: "What is the matter, Yap? Are you sick?"

"Nothing matter; me no sickie," said Yap.

"But why do you not bring on the supper?" asked Wright.

"No catchie any more," was the answer.

"What! Just potatoes straight, Yap? What is the matter?" said Wright.

"I no sabbie what's the matter," said the sullen Oriental. "You livie belly cheapie now. Potato belly good. Blenty potato, blenty saltie, blenty cold water; no makie you sickie; I dink belly good."

The Club took in the situation with great hilarity; the cause of Yap Sing's frugality was briefly explained to the guests; each seized a potato and commenced their meal.

At length Carlin asked Yap Sing if he could not furnish a little butter with the salt. Yap shook his head resolutely, and said:

"No catchie. Blutter five bittie [sixty-two and a half cents] one pound. No buy blutter for five bittie to putee on potato; too muchie money allee time pay out for hashie."

Then Ashley asked for a pickle, but Yap Sing was firm. Said he: "Pickle slix bittie one bottle; no can standee."

A great many other things were banteringly asked for, from cold tongue and horse-radish to blackberry jam; but the imperturbable face of the Mongolian never relaxed and his ears remained deaf to all entreaties.

The potatoes were eaten with a decided relish, though there was no seasoning except salt, and when the repast was over the Club still sat at the table while the Colonel delivered a dissertation upon the virtues of the potato in general and upon the Nevada potato in particular. He insisted that the potato was the great modern mind food, and instanced the effect of potato diet upon the people of Ireland, pointing out that the failure of a crop there meant mental prostration and despair, while the news of a bountiful crop was a certain sign of a lively revolution within the year. From a scientific standpoint he demonstrated that no where else on the continent were the conditions absolutely perfect for producing potatoes that were potatoes, except upon the high, dry, slightly alkaline table lands between the Sierras and the Wasatch Range, and, giving his lively imagination full play, he pictured that region as it would be fifty years hence; when transportation shall be reduced; when artesian wells shall be plenty; when the rich men of the earth will not be able to give entertainments without presenting their guests with Nevada or Utah potatoes, and when to say that a man has a potato estate in the desert will be as it now is to say that a man has a wheat farm in Dakota, an orange orchard in Los Angeles, or a cotton plantation in Texas.

While talking, the Colonel managed, between sentences, to dispose of a second potato.

When the pipes were resumed, the joke of Yap Sing was fully discussed, and finally the Chinese question came up for consideration.

Strong took up this latter theme and said:

"The men of the Eastern States think that we of the West are a cruel, half-barbarous race, because we look with distrust upon the swelling hosts of Mongolians that are swarming like locusts upon this coast. They say: 'Our land has ever been open to the oppressed, no matter in what guise they come. The men of the West are the first to stretch bars across the Golden Gate to keep out a people. And this people are peaceable and industrious; all they petition for is to come in and work. Still, there is a cry which swells into passionate invective against them. It must be the cry of barbarism and ignorance. It surely fairly reeks with injustice and cruelty and sets aside a fundamental principle of our Government which dedicates our land to freedom and opens all its gates to honest endeavor.'

"Those people will not stop to think that we came here from among themselves. We were no more ignorant, we were no worse than they when we came away. We have had better wages and better food since our coming than the ordinary men of the East obtain. Almost all of us have dreamed of homes, of wives and children that are men's right to possess, but which are not for us; and though they of the East do not know it, this experience has softened, not hardened our hearts, toward the weak and the oppressed. If they of the East would reflect they would have to conclude that it is not avarice that moves us; that there must be a less ungenerous and deeper reason.

"Our only comfort is, that, by and by, maybe while some of us still live, those men and women who now upbraid us, will, with their souls on their knees, ask pardon for so misjudging us.

"We quarantine ships when a contagion is raging among her crew; we frame protective laws to hold the price of labor up to living American rates; New England approves these precautions, but when we ask to have the same rules, in another form, enforced upon our coast, her people and her statesmen, in scorn and wrath, declare that we are monsters.

"There is Yap Sing in the kitchen. You have just paid him forty dollars for a month's work. All the clothes that he wears were made in China. If he boarded himself, as nearly as possible, he would eat only the food sent here from China. Of his forty dollars just received, thirty at least will be returned to China and be absorbed there. There are one hundred thousand of his people in this State and California. We will suppose that they save only thirty cents each per day. That means, for all, nine hundred thousand dollars per month, or more than ten million dollars per annum that they send away. This is the drain which two States with less than one million inhabitants are annually subjected to. How long would Massachusetts bear a similar drain, before through all her length and breadth, her cities would blaze with riots, all her air grow black with murder? Ireland, with six times as many people, and with the richest of soils, on half that tax, has become so poor that around her is drawn the pity of the world.

"'But,' say the Eastern people, 'you must receive them, Christianize them, and after awhile they will assimilate with you.'

"Waiving the degradation to us, which that implies, they propose an impossibility. They might just as well go down to where the Atlantic beats against the shore, and shout across the waste to the Gulf stream, commanding it to assimilate with the 'common waters' of the sea. Not more mysterious is the law that holds that river of the deep within its liquid banks, than is the instinct which prevents the Chinaman from shaking off his second nature and becoming an American. He looks back through the halo of four thousand years, sees that without change, the nation of his forefathers has existed, and with him all other existing nations except Japan and India and Persia, are parvenues.

"For thousands of years, he and his fathers before him, have been waging a hand-to-hand conflict with Want. He has stripped and disciplined himself until he is superior to all hardships except famine, and that he holds at bay longer than any other living creature could.

"Through this training process from their forms everything has disappeared except a capacity to work; in their brains every attribute has died except the selfish ones; in their hearts nearly all generous emotions have been starved to death. The faces of the men have given up their beards, the women have surrendered their breasts and the ability to blush has faded from their faces.

"Like all animals of fixed colors they change neither in habits nor disposition. In four thousand years they have changed no more than have the wolves that make their lairs in the foothills of the Ural mountains, except that they have learned to economize until they can even live upon half the air which the white man requires to exist in. They have trained their stomachs until they are no longer the stomachs of men; but such as are possessed by beasts of prey; they thrive on food from which the Caucasian turns with loathing, and on this dreadful fare work for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.

"The moral sentiments starved to death in their souls centuries ago. They hold woman as but an article of merchandise and delight to profit by her shame.

"Other foreigners come to America to share the fortunes of Americans. Even the poor Italian, with organ and monkey, dreams while turning his organ's crank, that this year or next, or sometime, he will be able to procure a little home, have a garden of his own, and that his children will grow up – sanctified by citizenship – defenders of our flag.

"But the Chinaman comes with no purpose except for plunder; the sole intention is to get from the land all that is possible, with the design of carrying it or sending it back to native land. The robbery is none the less direct and effective for being carried on with a non-combatant smile instead of by force.

"It is such a race as this that we are asked to welcome and compete with, and when we explain that the food we each require – we, without wife or child to share with – costs more in the market daily than these creatures are willing to work for and board themselves; the question, with a lofty disdain, is asked: 'Are you afraid to compete with a Chinaman?'

"It is an unworthy question, born of ignorance and a false sentimentality; for no mortal can overcome the impossible.

"In the cities these creatures fill the places of domestics and absorb all the simpler trades. The natural results follow. Girls and boys grow up without ever being disciplined to labor. But girls and boys must have food and clothes. If their parents can not clothe and feed them other people must. If poor girls with heads and hands untrained have nothing but youth and beauty to offer for food, when hungry enough they will barter both for bread.

"The vices and diseases which the Chinese have already scattered broadcast over the west, are maturing in a harvest of measureless and indescribable suffering.

"The Chinese add no defense to the State. They have no patriotism except for native land; they are all children of degraded mothers, and as soldiers are worthless.

"Moreover it is not a question of sharing our country with them; it is simply a question of whether we should surrender it to them or not. When the western nations thoroughly understand the Chinese they will realize that with their numbers, their imitative faculties, their capacity to live and to work on food which no white man can eat, with their appalling thrift and absence of moral faculties, they are, to-day, the terror of the earth.

"The nations forced China to open her gates to them. It was one of the saddest mistakes of civilization.

"To ask that their further coming be stopped, is simply making a plea for the future generations of Americans, a prayer for the preservation of our Republic. It springs from man's primal right of self-preservation, and when we are told that we should share our country and its blessings with the Chinese, the first answer is that they possess already one-tenth of the habitable globe; their empire has everything within it to support a nation; they have, besides, the hoarded wealth of a hundred generations, and if these were not enough, there are still left illimitable acres of savage lands. Let them go occupy and subdue them.

"The civilization of China had been as perfect as it now is for two thousand years when our forefathers were still barbarians. While our race has been subduing itself and at the same time learning the lessons which lead up to submission to order and to law; while, moreover, it has been bringing under the ægis of freedom a savage continent, the Mongolian has remained stationary. To assert that we should now turn over this inheritance (of which we are but the trustees for the future), or any part of it, to 'the little brown men,' is to forget that a nation's first duty is like a father's, who, by instinct, watches over his own child with more solicitude than over the child of a stranger, and who, above all things, will not place his child under the influence of anything that will at once contaminate and despoil him.

"Finally, by excluding these people no principle of our Government is set aside, and no vital practice which has grown up under our form of government. Ours is a land of perfect freedom, but we arrest robbers and close our doors to lewd women. While these precautions are right and necessary it is necessary and right to turn back from our shores the sinister hosts of the Orient."

With this the whole Club except Brewster heartily agreed. Brewster merely said: "Maybe you are right, but your argument ignores the saving grace of Christianity, and maybe conflicts with God's plans."

Then the good-nights were said.

CHAPTER XV

The next evening when supper was prepared, Harding was not present. He had bruised one hand so badly in the mine the previous day, that he was forced to have it bound up and treated with liniments and had not worked that day. Thinking he would be home soon the rest ate their suppers, but it was an hour before he came. When he arrived he had a troubled look, and being pressed to tell what had gone wrong, he stated that he had met a group of five miners from the Sierra Nevada day shift, men whom they all knew, who, without provocation, had commenced abusing him; jeering him about joining with six or seven more miners, hiring a house and a cook, and putting on airs; that finally they dared him to fight, and when he offered to fight any one of them, they said it was a mere "bluff," that he would not fight a woman unless she were sick, and further declared their purpose at some future time to go up and "clean out" the whole outfit.

Harding was the younger member of the Club; the rest knew about his former life; how his father, joining the reckless throng of the early days, lived fast, and suddenly died, just as the boy came from school; how the young man had put aside his hopes, learned mining, and with a brave purpose was working hard and dreaming of the time when he would wipe away every reproach which rested on his father's memory.

To have him set upon by roughs, causelessly, was like a blow in the face to every other member of the Club. When Harding had told his story, Miller said: "Who did you say these men were, Harding?"

Harding told their names.

"Why, they are not miners at all," said Carlin. "They are a lot of outside bruisers who have come here because there is going to be an election this year, and they have got their names on a pay roll to keep from being arrested as vagrants. You did just right, Harding, to get away from them with your crippled hand without serious trouble."

"Indeed you did, Harding," said Brewster. "One street fight at your age might ruin you for life."

"That is quite true," said Miller; "I am glad you had no fight."

Said Corrigan: "You offered to fight any one of the blackguards, and whin they refused, you came away? It was the proper thing to do."

"Did you have any weapons with you, Harding?" asked Ashley.

"Not a thing in the world," was the reply.

"I am glad of that," said Ashley. "The temptation to wing one or two of the brutes, would have been very great had you been 'fixed.'"

"I am glad it was no worse," said Wright. "You said it was down by the California Bank corner?"

"No," replied Harding; "it was by the Fredericksburg Brewery corner, on Union Street, just below C."

"You managed the matter first-rate, Harding," said Wright. "Do not think any more about it."

Harding, thus reassured by his friends, felt better, but said if three of the Club would go with him he would undertake to do his part to bring hostilities to a successful close with the bullies.

Ashley and Corrigan at once volunteered, but Wright and Carlin interfered and said it must not be, and Brewster expostulated against any such thing.

Corrigan and Ashley caught a look and gesture from Wright which caused them to subside, and Harding at length went out to supper.

When Harding came in from up town, Miller was making arrangements to go out, as he said, to meet a broker as per agreement. As Harding went to supper, Miller went out and Brewster resumed the reading of a book in which he was engaged. The Professor, Colonel and Alex had not yet come in.

Significant glances passed between the others, and soon Wright arose and said: "Boys! the Emmetts drill to-night; suppose we go down to the armory and look on for half an hour."

The rest all agreed that it would be good exercise, and quietly the four men went out, Wright saying as he started: "Brewster, if the others come, tell them we have just gone down to the Emmetts armory, and will be back in half an hour or so."

The Professor and Alex shortly after came in, a little later the Colonel and Miller. It was nearly an hour before the others returned. When they did they were in the best possible humor; spoke of the perfectness of the Emmetts' drill; told of something they had heard down town which was droll, while Barney in particular was full of merriment over a speech that had that day been made by a countryman of his, Mr. Snow, in a Democratic convention, and insisted upon telling Brewster about it.

Brewster laid down his book and assumed the attitude of a listener.

"It was this way," said Barney. "The convintion had made all its nominations, when it was proposed that on Friday nixt a grand mass-ratification matin' should be hild at Carson City, the matin' to be intinded for the inauguratin' of the campaign, where all the faithful from surroundin' counties might mate and glorify, and thus intimidate the inemy from the viry commincement.

"The proposition was carried by acclamation, and jist thin a mimber sprang up and moved that the matin' should be a barbecue. This motion likewise carried by an overwhilmin' vote. Whin the noise died away a bit, my ould friend Snow, he of the boardin' house, arose and made a motion. It was beautiful. Listen!

"'Mr. Spaker! Bain that the hift of the Dimocratic party do not ate mate of a Friday, I move yees, sir, that we make it a fish barbecue.'"

A great laugh followed Barney's account of the motion, and then the usual comparison of notes on stocks took place. Miller was sure that Silver Hill was the best buy on the lode; Corrigan had been told by a Gold Hill miner that Justice was looking mighty encouraging; the Colonel had heard the superintendent of the Curry tell the superintendent of the Belcher that he was in wonderfully kindly ground on the two thousand foot level; the Professor had that day heard the superintendent of the Savage declare that the water was lowering four feet an hour, while all were wondering when the Sierra Nevada would break, as it was too high for the development. By all is meant all but Brewster and Harding; they never joined in any conversations about stocks.

At length the stock talk slackened, when Corrigan again referred to the fish barbecue resolution. Naturally enough, the conversation drifted into a discussion of the humor of the coast, when the Colonel said:

"There is not much pure humor on this coast. There is plenty of that material called humor, which has a bitter sting to it, but that is not the genuine article. The men here who think as Hood wrote, are not plenty. I suspect the bitter twang to all the humor here comes from the isolation of men from the society of women, from broken hopes, and it seems to me is generally an attempt to hurl contempt, not upon the individual at whom it is fired, but at the outrageous fortunes which hedge men around. The coast has been running over with that sort of thing, I guess since 'forty-nine.'

"A man here, fond of his wife and children, said to a friend a day or two after they went away for a visit to California: 'Did you ever see a motherless colt?'

"'Oh, yes,' was the reply.

"'Then,' said the man, 'you know just how I feel.'

"'Yes,' said the friend. 'I suppose you feel as though you are not worth a dam.'

"I know a brother lawyer who is somewhat famous for getting the clients whom he defends convicted. One morning he met a brother attorney, a wary old lawyer, and said to him: 'I heard some men denouncing you this morning and I took up your defense.'

"'What did you say?' the other asked.

"'Those men were slandering you and I took it upon myself to defend you,' said the first lawyer.

"The old lawyer took the other by the arm, led him aside, then putting his lips close to the ear of his friend, in a hoarse whisper said: 'Don't do it any more.'

"'I am going to lecture to-night at C – ,' said a pompous man.

"'I am glad of it,' was the quick answer. 'I have hated the people there for years. No punishment is too severe for them.'

"'I am particular who I drink with,' said a man curtly to another.

"'Yes?' was the answer. 'I outgrew that foolish pride long ago. I would as soon you would drink with me as not.'

"'I do not require lecturing from you,' said a man. 'I am no reformed drunkard.'

"'Then why do you not reform?' was the response.

"This coast is full of the echoes of such things."

The Professor spoke next. "I think," said he, "that there is more extravagance in figures of speech on this coast than in any other country. Marcus Shults had a difficulty in Eureka the other day, when I was there. He told me about it. Said he: 'I told him to keep away; that I was afraid of him. I wanted some good man to hear me say that, but I had my eye on him every minute, and had he come a step nearer, why – when the doctors would have been called in to dissect him they would have thought they had struck a new lead mine.'"

Here Wright interrupted the Professor. "Marcus was from my State, Professor. Did you ever hear him explain why he did not become a fighter?"

The Professor answered that he never had, when Wright continued:

"Marcus never took kindly to hard work. Indeed, he seems to have constitutional objections to it. As he tells the story, while crossing the plains he made up his mind that, upon reaching California, he would declare himself and speedily develop into a fighter. His words, when he told me the story, were: 'They knew me back in Missouri, and I was a good deal too smart to attempt to practice any such profession there, but my idea was that California was filled with Yankees, and in that kind of a community I would have an easy going thing. Well, I crossed the Sierras and landed at Diamond Springs, outside of Placerville a few miles, and when I had been there a short time I changed my mind.'