The better-class San Franciscan doesn’t go to Chinatown simply because he doesn’t need to. In fact, as a distinguished and experienced resident said to me after I had been through Chinatown: “My dear Mr. Griffith, Chinatown may be pretty bad, but anyhow it’s run open and above board, as anybody can go and see that likes to take the trouble. If you were stopping here a month instead of two or three days, I could show you things that Chinatown isn’t a circumstance to. You just roof all San Francisco in, and you’ll have the biggest, dandiest, high-toned, up-to-date——” “Yes,” I interrupted, “I see what you mean. I heard about that in the train. Sorry I’m not stopping.” This of course only referred to decent, Christian vice, the sort which some of the most respectable of us practice without compunction as long as we’re not found out. But when you have eastern and western vice mixed, as you do in Chinatown and San Francisco, you get a compound calculated to raise the gorge of a graven image. There are certain crimes which have no names, and of such is the wickedness of Chinatown. Some one once said that the exterior of a house was a pretty good criterion of the character of the people who lived in it. This is certainly true of Chinatown. The streets are narrow, ill-paved, and dirty. They also smell, as the other streets in San Francisco don’t. Those who have travelled know that the Purple East has a smell entirely its own, just as a London lodging-house has. Moreover, wherever a piece of the East like Chinatown is transplanted into the West, you get that smell, full-bodied and entire. Wherefore, when I dived into Chinatown, San Francisco, I remarked: “Why, is this King Street, Hongkong, or Malay Street, Singapore?” The East never changes, no matter whether it is west or east. The restaurants, with their gaudily carved beams and their queer windows, with their upstairs rooms, containing priceless treasures of Oriental art, their iron money-chests, with half a dozen different locks on them, so that they could only be opened in the presence of all the partners in the concern; the paper lanterns outside, the weird hieroglyphical signs, the little joss tables in the inner compartments of the shops, with their images and odorous incense sticks—it was all the undiluted Orient, ages old, in the midst of the newest of the Occidental civilisations, one of those queer paradoxes which go to show the looseness of our most rigid principles and the shallowness of our deepest convictions. After seeing sundry other things which would be difficult of description in printable English, I made a tour of a common lodging-house in Chinatown. I have slept in a common lodging-house in London, and I have seen humanity go to sleep under many and various conditions; but I never saw anything like this. Only a few hundred yards away was the Palace Hotel, with its rooms at four dollars a night; here you could sleep for five cents,—twopence-halfpenny,—but what sleeping!