During the first few years of their coming, the Chinese in California were welcomed, and were looked upon with favor. They were industrious, tractable, and inoffensive, and were willing to undertake the hard, menial, and disagreeable forms of labor—partly work generally done by women—for which native labor was not available under existing conditions. Their strange manners and customs aroused nothing more than feelings of curiosity. But gradually a feeling of opposition to them began to grow up, fomented by the jealousy and race prejudice of the miners. Their peculiar appearance and strange customs began to make them the objects of suspicion and hatred. This feeling was intensified by the presence of a large element of southerners in California, who classed all people of dark skin—“South Americans, South Europeans, Kanakas, Malays, or Chinese”—together as colored. Wild stories of their character and habits began to circulate, and with each repetition gained strength until they passed current as facts. Among these were the assertions that the Chinese were practically all coolies, or labor slaves, that they were highly immoral and vicious, that they had secret tribunals which inflicted the death penalty without due process of law, that they displaced native labor, that they could not be Christianized, that they had no intention of remaining as permanent residents of the country and would not assimilate with the natives, that they sent money out of the country, etc. Most of these charges have been proven to be either wholly false or highly exaggerated by recent investigations, and were so recognized by the more sober and fair-minded students of the subject at the time. But for the mass of the people of the Pacific coast, and for many in other parts of the country, they acquired all the force of established dogma, and their reiteration passed for argument. The Chinaman became the scapegoat for all the ills that afflicted the youthful community, from whatever cause they really arose, and in time an anti-Chinese declaration came to be essential for the success of any political party or candidate. In such a state of public opinion it was inevitable that their lot should be a hard one. They were robbed, beaten, murdered, and persecuted in a variety of ways. The foreign miners’ license tax was used against them in a discriminating way which amounted to quasi legal plunder.