That the Chinese would require some powerful force to set this tide in motion, a few instances would indicate. The Chinese do the same thing in the same way today as their ancestors did it five hundred years ago. If a village street is so crooked that one must walk an extra mile, no one would think of straightening the street. If the village well was the source of water supply in the past centuries, the substitution of a pump would not be thought of, as it would be an insult to the past. They dislike even the most trivial changes; the altering of the time of the regular hour of meetings; a re-arrangement in the seating of their class rooms, or the transfer of a teacher, all disturb them. Because things used to be done in such and such a way is the reason that they ought to be done so now. Old customs are followed, although the life has long since departed from them. For example, “It is the custom in Mongolia for every one who can afford it to use snuff and offer it to his friends. Each man has a small snuff box which he produces whenever he encounters a friend; if the person with the snuff box happens to be out of snuff, that does not prevent the passing of the box, from which each guest takes a deliberate, though imaginary, pinch and returns it to the owner. To seem to notice that the box was empty would not be good form, and all is according to a well settled precedent.” “In a country like China, which stretches through some twenty-five degrees of latitude, but in which furs are taken off and straw hats are put on according to a fixed rule for the whole Empire, in regions where the only heat in the house during the winter comes from the stove bed or _k’ang_, it is not uncommon for travelers who have been caught in a ‘cold snap’ to find that no arguments can induce the landlord of the inn to heat the _k’ang_, because ‘the season for heating the k’ang has not arrived.’” American street car companies and apartment house owners have at times taken a leaf from the Chinese in this particular. What could move this people to leave their home and seek a new world? THE CHINESE IN AMERICA _What Caused Their Coming?_ The first large migration of the Chinese to America may be explained by two words, War and Gold. In 1850 the great Tai Ping rebellion broke out and soon spread poverty and ruin through southeastern China; the terrors of war with its ever present hand-maidens, famine and plunder, ruined all business and paralyzed all industry. The farmer class of the sea coast districts was driven into Hong Kong and there they met the astonishing stories of the fabulous wealth in the recently discovered gold fields of California and Australia. That, in brief, is the history of the first big wave of Chinese migration to America.