A Vicious Letter to the Editor from 1885

Editor Post-Intelligencer: Allow me, through your valuable paper, to express my thoughts on the curse of the Pacific Coast, the Chinamen. You will doubtless remember few years ago a man tried to commit suicide. What was the reason? So many Chinamen employed that a white man cannot get work—because they will work for $1 per day, and live on 10 cents worth of rice, and where a white man needs something more and better wages, and then, when they have saved up a few hundred dollars, they go to China, and that much money is lost to the country. Why, the native Indians are better than Chinese, for they spend their money here, and thus keep it in the country! Chinamen wear China cloth, shoes and hats, eat and smoke tobacco from China, and when they have occasion to purchase anything they patronize Chinese merchants. Look at all the mills on the Sound, Chinamen under cover, getting steady work, and white men begging and praying for employment. These are not idle bummers who curse the Chinese, but honest, hard-working men, who are starving, and suffering for the very necessaries of life. But it will not be many years before the workingmen on this coast will club together, and clean out the whole of the long-tailed population of the Pacific Coast. There is bound to be a war between the capitalists and working classes, and that before long, too.