The people of San Francisco are of all kindreds and tongues. Buddha, Mahomet, and Confucius are prayed to beside the Christian temples. The Indians of the Mission have faded from the peninsula and the sombreroed Spaniard dashes no more from the Mission to the beach about his bull-fights and bear-baitings. But here are Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Celts, Greeks, Slavs, Latins, Hindus, Chinese, Kanakas, Japanese, and Chilenos, all mixing in the great crucible and slowly shaping a new type of man, the Western American. All seem to be mixing, it should be explained, except the Chinese, for, after a quarter of a century of experience, San Francisco feels that her Chinese population is still an alien body and sure to remain so even to the third and fourth generation. [Illustration CHINESE GROCERY STORE.] The problem of Chinese immigration has come up again and again in San Francisco. In 1869 the Chinese were invited and welcomed from China. In 1892, the Geary law was passed prohibiting the coming of any but the student class and providing for deportation under certain conditions. A generation grew up between this hail and farewell, China in the meantime pouring her tens of thousands of coolies into San Francisco. California welcomes any race that affiliates. But she has found that the Chinese race is not as the impressionable Indian or negro; but is an arrested race in the yoke of caste and ancient tradition, one looking with contempt upon upstart Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Chinese swarmed into a quarter of the city about Portsmouth Square, and have made there a small, evil-smelling Canton, where only a foreign tongue is spoken, and where strange gods are worshipped. Few have brought wives. Slave girls are the only women. Every Chinese prays to die in China, or to have his bones rot there. American law to most of them is but a pestilent thing to be evaded. They have no interest in the growth of the country or its institutions. They work for starvation wages, their living being extremely cheap, requiring only tea and rice and a bare shelf to sleep upon in a room crowded with such shelves. Being imitative, and as patient as cattle, and withal so cheap as hirelings, they have taken the places of women in the household and factory and the places of men and boys in the work of dock and shop and field. The assertion that this labor liberates the whites for higher work does not seem to be verified. Many trace the vicious "hoodlum" class of both sexes to the enforced idleness of these young people, springing from the iron competition of the Chinese in the labor market. [Illustration SMOKING ROOM, CHINESE RESTAURANT.]