minutes or more. My friend ran swiftly, and kept a little ahead of the beast; of course I wouldn't be so undignified as to run from a cow, but I managed to keep at the side of my fleet friend, and came out a trifle in advance of him. We furnished free amusement to a crowd of Chinese, who looked and laughed, thinking it was capital fun to see a couple of barbarians pursued by a Chinese cow, and never stopping to consider how the barbarians might like it. But the tables are turned, and more than turned, in San Francisco and Melbourne, where the white man has a great deal of sport at Chinese expense. In each of those cities it is not unusual to see a large dog pursuing a frightened Celestial, amid the jeers of a group of voters who have set the brute to his work.

There are those who fear that the Chinese, unless restrained, will overrun America, take control of the labor market, and ultimately secure the monopoly of many branches of commercial enterprise. Some

of these are alarmists, and see great calamities in the immediate future, and some are demagogues, who talk what they do not believe, because it is for their political interest to do so. But there are others who judge the future by the past, and have given careful study to the question; they believe that the present evil will go on increasing steadily, but not rapidly; and while there is no immediate danger to be feared, it is well to consider the distant future.

Estimating the number of Chinese in the United States at a quarter of a million, and our whole population at a round forty millions, we can see no immediate danger to our prosperity or safety. Our annual increase is quite as great as any Chinese immigration in its most flourishing period, and there is little probability that their numerical proportions will be larger than at present. As is well known, not one emigrant in a thousand brings his family. The American consul at Hong-Kong informed me that while nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese

men went from that port to San Francisco in one year, there were less than two hundred women, and this has been about the proportion ever since the emigration began. Of Chinese children born in America there are barely sufficient to fill an ordinary church, and certainly we must be timid indeed if we have fears of these.

Dry up the source, and the stream will disappear in time. We have only to revise. our treaties so as to prevent the advent of new immigrants, and leave the matter of the return of those now in America quite out of consideration. Tempus edax rerum will steadily reduce the number of those who stay, and by the beginning of the coming century less than half the present number will be alive. Another twenty-five years will make still further havoc, and long before the celebration of our second centennial the last Chinese among us will have gone to his grave, and left us a free and happy people.

III.

ANGLO-CHINESE LANGUAGE.

To our commercial intercourse with China we are indebted for the invention of modern times known as "pigeon English." In attempting to pronounce the word "business," the Chinese were formerly unable to get nearer to the real sound than "pidgin" or "pigeon;" hence the adoption of that word, which means nothing more nor less than "business." Pigeon English is therefore business English, and is the language of commerce at the open ports of China, or wherever else the native and foreigner come in contact. A pigeon French has made its appearance in Saigon and at other places, and is steadily increasing as French commerce has increased. On the frontier line between Russia and China there is an important trading-point-Kiachta-where the

commerce of the two empires was exclusively conducted for a century and a half. In 1866 I visited Kiachta, and found that a pigeon Russian existed there, and was the medium of commercial transactions between the Russian and Chinese merchants. Long ago the Portuguese at Macao had a corresponding jargon for their intercourse with the Chinese; and it may be safely stated that wherever the Chinese have established permanent relations with any country, a language of trade has immediately sprung into existence, and is developed as time rolls on and its necessities multiply.

The decline in Portuguese trade with China was accompanied with a corresponding decline in the language, but it left its impress upon the more recent pigeon English, which contains many Portuguese words. Pigeon English is a language by itself, with very little inflection either in noun, pronoun, or verb, and with a few words doing duty for many. The Chinese learn it readily, as they have no grammati