CHAPTER XII.
A CRUISE ON THE BARBARY COAST.
Night Scenes in San Francisco.—Low Life.—Scene in a Recently Suppressed Gambling House.—Visit to the Chinese Quarter.—How John Chinaman loses his Money.—The Thieves and Rounders of San Francisco.—How they Live and where they Lodge.—The Dance-Cellars.—Opium Dens and Thieves' Ordinaries of the Barbary Coast.—How the San Francisco Police treat old offenders, etc., etc.
Every city on earth has its special sink of vice, crime and degradation, its running ulcer or moral cancer, which it would fain hide from the gaze of mankind. London has its St. Giles, New York its Five Points, and each of the other Atlantic and Western cities its peculiar plague spot and curse; it is even asserted that there are certain localities in Chicago where vice prevails to a greater extent, and life, virtue and property are less secure than in others. San Franciscans will not yield the palm of superiority to anything to be found elsewhere in the world. Speak of the deeper depth, the lower hell, the maelstrom of vice and iniquity—from whence those who once fairly enter escape no more forever—and they will point triumphantly to the Barbary Coast, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity, and challenge you to match it anywhere outside of the lake of fire and brimstone.
