"Well," I continued, "two of them got away, but the boys held on to the third, and hauled me out of bed at three o’clock this morning to find out what was to be done with him. He protested that he was an innocent citizen on his way home from an over-convivial evening. But as he couldn’t explain what he was doing in your back yard at that time of night, we took him down to the police station. Instead of finding him in the jailbird class, he turned out to be a small politician out of a job. Just now he figures as sergeant-at-arms of the Twelfth Ward Anti-Coolie Club." "The Anti-Coolie Club?" said Wharton Kendrick, wrinkling his brows. "I don’t see what an anti-coolie club could want to do to me. I’m pretty well qualified for membership myself." General Wilson’s face flamed redder than before, in the frame of his aggressive side-whiskers, and he smote the desk with his fist. "Good Lord, Kendrick! You don’t mean to tell me that you take any stock in such riotous nonsense as these anti-coolie fellows here are getting off! Why, I was listening to one of them last night, and he roared like a bull-calf about the Chinese taking the bread out of the hands of the workmen, and split his lungs telling that the heathen must be driven into the sea. Why, sir, he made my blood boil, and if I was made provost-marshal of this town for one day, I’d bundle him and his crew down to the docks, and have them sailing over sea before night came." Wharton Kendrick gave a good-humored laugh. "My dear Wilson, I don’t take much stock in the loud-mouthed orators, but I say, with them, that if we are to have the choice of a white or a yellow civilization in California, my vote goes to the white." "Stuff and nonsense!" cried General Wilson, thumping the desk once more. "Why, my dear sir, you challenge the fundamental principles of this government when you say we must shut out these men merely because their skins are yellow. Why, sir, it is to our advantage, not to our detriment, that they work for small wages. The lower their wages, the less money they take out of the country, and when they go home they leave behind them the great works they have accomplished. God has given you illimitable resources, and you are crying out for hands to develop them, and here you are, ready to shut out the most plentiful and cheapest supply of labor that exists on the face of the green earth. It’s against business principles and it’s against the principles of humanity, and you can never do it, sir--never." "Oh, fudge, Wilson, you don’t know anything about the problem, and yet you come here telling us old Californians what we ought to think about it. I’ll admit anything you say in favor of the coolies. They’re industrious and faithful and cheap; but they’re more than that. The Chinese can drive us out of any line they want to take up. I’ve seen that done too many times to doubt it any longer."