irresistible convenience to the farmer, vineyardist, and other employer.
"How do you arrange to get your Chinese?" I asked a man in the country who
was employing more than a hundred in several gangs. He replied: "I have
only to go or send to a Chinese employment office in San Francisco, and
say that I need so many men for such work and at such pay. Directly up
come the men, with a foreman of their own, with whom alone I have to deal.
I tell only him what I want done; I settle with him alone; I complain
to him, and hold him alone responsible. He understands English; and this
system simplifies things amazingly. If I employed white men I should
have to instruct, reprove, watch, and pay each one separately; and of a
hundred, a quarter, at least, would be dropping out day after day for
one cause or another. Moreover, with my Chinese comes up a cook for every
twenty men, whom I pay, and provisions of their own which they buy. Thus I
have nobody to feed and care for. They do it themselves."

This is the reply I have received in half a dozen instances where I made
inquiry of men who employed from twenty-five to two hundred Chinese. Any
one can see that, with such an organization of labor, many things can be
easily done which under our different and looser system a man would not
rashly undertake. So far as I have been able to learn, such a thing as
a gang of Chinese leaving a piece of work they had engaged to do, unless
they were cheated or ill-treated, is unknown. Then they don't drink
whisky. With all this, any one can see that they need not work cheaply.
To a man who wants to get a piece of work done their systematic ways are
worth a good deal of money. In point of fact, they are quick enough to
demand higher wages.

[Illustration: A SAW-MILL PORT ON PUGET SOUND.]

Of the population of Califoraia when the census of 1870 was taken, 49,310